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Facebook Pixels for Shopify-Do’s and Don’ts

· 5 min read
Kirul

Facebook Pixel is a useful piece of code when it comes to user data tracking. This tool allows you to scout potential customer targets and optimize ads accordingly, dramatically improving your sales. In fact, putting up Facebook ads on Shopify without Pixel is akin to misplacing a winning lottery ticket.

What does Facebook Pixel do?​

Facebook Pixel(Meta Pixel) pulls up a library of functions that lets you observe a customer taking an action in your website. These actions are called ‘conversions’, and these conversions are tracked by Pixels as ‘events’. It uses data such as http headers to track user events in your Shopify store. These events include:

  • Lead- signing up for a free trial, phone number and email submissions, etc.

  • Adding to cart- adding products to a cart to be purchased

  • Purchase- buying the product

  • Check out process

  • Customized events- created when the event you want tracked is not available

Pixel will feed back these events to Meta advertising platforms so Facebook smart ads could know whether to present ads to consumers interested in your store listings.

Why is Pixel a good addition to your Shopify store?​

The data that Pixel collects allows greater insight into customer needs, and the ads will be run accordingly. These insights also let you observe how well your ads perform and how the budget should be allocated. Depending on your ad performance, the settings can also be changed to fit your needs. Data is gaining more and more importance, therefore a solid integration between Pixel and your Shopify. The three areas in which Pixel plays an important role are: audience creation, measurement and optimization.

Audience Creation​

Pixel aids you in finding potential customers amidst users, and also retargets people who have made any prior interactions with your Shopify store. From these customers, you can setup a custom audience based on events that take place such as purchases, to whom you don’t have to retarget ads with the same action they undertook. Data from Pixel can also be used to create lookalike audiences, which are made to help you approach audiences with similar interests to your target audience. These are beneficial because of their automatic updating mechanisms, which ensures they are still around for cold traffic campaigns.

Measurement​

Using Pixel data, it is easy to understand peoples reactions to your ads at the beginning of their purchase funnel. A cool aspect is that it allows you to see how website interaction between the website and user happens, even if its cross platformed across different devices.

Automatic Optimization​

Facebook has collected a lot of user data over the years, therefore pixel finds users that are most likely to convert, and all you have to do to enable that is to set your objective as ‘set up conversions’. This starts an automatic bidding process to reach the interested parties.

Bad data collection​

The ads you run must always prioritize target audiences, and not dwell on the users that are not showing interest. An important factor to keep in mind is that to track events successfully, a good amount of track planning is required. It is highly recommended you keep Pixel installation as an utmost priority, because in the case of poor pixel installation, the data received will be inadequate, leading to a low conversion rate, resulting in poor customer targeting.

In contrast, good pixel installation with more refined data optimizes your ads better, and the customer targeting will be of a better quality.

How to find the best pixel tool for you?​

To get the maximum use of your pixel tool, make sure to see if the tool has the following features:

  • Quick and easy installation to manage your time

  • Customer data you receive is of a satisfactory volume and accurate

  • A tool to overlook the daily events, in case of a disruption, so that you’re updated

Additionally, due to the increasing use of cookie blockers, Apples strict data policies following IOS14 (which other companies will most likely follow suit in the near future), Pixel works at its best when paired up with the Conversions API, which is a server site tool that does not require the use of cookies for data extraction.

Requirements for Pixel Installation​

  • Pixel ID

  • Conversion API(CAPI) Access Token

  • Facebook Ads Manager access

  • Access to Shopify Data and theme

Operators within EU regions are also required to agree to its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Remember to switch into Business Account.

Important note: Your Meta Pixel ID is quite vulnerable, and anyone can steal it. This will lead to issues such as a competitor implementing your Pixel ID on an unrelated website, away from target audiences. To deal with this, regular pixel audits must be conducted, so you can fish these issues out right away.

This was hopefully a useful guide on what to do and what not to do when it comes to boosting your Shopify business experience with Facebook Pixel. If proper implementation is followed, and adequate checkups are done, Pixel will drastically improve your marketing campaigns with relative ease.