Facebook Ads and the Facebook Pixel can be used together in order to drive traffic to your campaign as well as to get analytics on certain events that occur there such as page views and contributions. While the full scope of the features offered by Facebook’s Ads Manager are far outside of this article and there are many ways to set up an ad, we’ll cover a basic use case and show how to integrate it with your campaign. For those that would like to delve further into more advanced uses, we recommend these tutorials from Facebook as a great place to start. Since the Facebook pixel and Ads Manager are a third-party service, we are unable to provide support in interpreting the data that it collects.
- What's the Difference Between Facebook Ads and the Facebook Pixel?
- Creating a Facebook Pixel
- How to Add Your Facebook Pixel to Your Campaign
- What Events Does the Pixel Track?
- Creating a Facebook Ad
- Customizing the Ads Manager Dashboard
- Accuracy of Analytics
What’s the Difference Between Facebook Ads and the Facebook Pixel?
Facebook ads are advertisements that run on Facebook. They can be used to direct traffic to your campaign page. The Facebook pixel is a bit of code that exists on your Indiegogo campaign that is used to track certain actions that a user takes on the page. When used together you will be able to target an ad to a certain audience, direct them to your campaign page and then see if that user made a contribution to your campaign. You’ll need to create an ad on Facebook and add your ad’s pixel ID to your Indiegogo campaign in order to get them to work together.
Creating a Facebook Pixel
Every Facebook ads account has a Facebook pixel that is associated with it. If you’ve never created an ad, you’ll want to set your pixel up first. This can be done under the Facebook Pixel tab in your Ads Manager. If you already have created a Facebook pixel you can skip ahead to How to Add Your Facebook Pixel to Your Campaign. Otherwise, you should see a screen asking you to create your pixel.
Go ahead and click on the button to Create a Pixel. You’ll be asked to name your pixel - this can be anything you want, but you only get one so choose wisely! Once the pixel is created you’ll be shown the pixel ID and have an option to email the pixel code to someone or install the pixel yourself. All you’ll need for using the pixel on your Indiegogo campaign is the pixel ID, we take care of the code for you! Copy down the pixel ID shown here.
How to Add Your Facebook Pixel to Your Campaign
All you need to add your pixel to your Indiegogo campaign is the pixel ID. This can be found under the Facebook Pixel tab in your Ads Manager. We automatically handle adding all of the pixel code and inject your pixel ID into it. Log in to your Indiegogo account and go to the Campaign Editor for your campaign. Under the Extras tab you’ll see a section for Facebook Ad Tracking. Choose Use the New Facebook Pixel and enter your pixel ID into the supplied field. Save your changes and your pixel is now installed on your campaign!
What Events Does the Pixel Track?
There are three different conversion events that are tracked on Indiegogo campaign pages - viewContent, addToCart, and Purchase. This is a breakdown of where these events will fire on your campaign:
- Main Campaign Page: viewContent
- Checkout Page: viewContent and addToCart
- Thank You Page: Purchase
More information on Facebook’s standard events can be found here.
Creating a Facebook Ad
Now that you’ve got your Facebook pixel created and added to your Indiegogo campaign, let’s create an ad that’s linked to it! For the purposes of this article we’re going to be creating an ad one of the many ways that are possible. For a more in depth overview of Facebook ads, we recommend checking out Facebook’s education articles.
To get started, log into Facebook and go to the Ads Manager. The first thing we’ll need to do is choose an objective for the ad campaign. In this case we’re going to choose Increase conversions on your website. Enter the full URL of your Indiegogo campaign in the field that says Enter URL to promote. We’ll now be asked which conversion event the ad should be optimized for. We want this ad to be optimized for getting people to make contributions to our campaign so we’re choosing the Purchase event from the drop down. If a red dot shows next to the event that means that no information for that event has been fired before. Specifically in this case it means that no one has made a contribution to the campaign since the Facebook pixel was added to it. Once someone contributes the dot will turn green and the event will be considered verified by Facebook. You can ignore the info box notifying you of this and click on Create Ad Account.
The next step is to enter some basic information about your account. This is pretty straight forward - just enter in whatever applies to you.
The next step is to set your audience, placement and ad budget. We’ll be leaving all of these settings at their defaults but Facebook Audiences can be configured in very specific ways in order to target the types of users you think would be most impacted by your ad. Here’s a great resource on Facebook Audiences.
We’ll leave the Placements setting at automatic but again, you can adjust this based off of your marketing strategy. Go ahead and set your daily budget and schedule for the ad and click on continue.
The next section is where you choose the format of your ad and choose what images or videos you’d like to use for it. Again, these choices are completely up to you. After you’ve got everything looking the way you want it to, click on Place Order!
Customizing the Ads Manager Dashboard
So now you’ve got your pixel added to your Indiegogo campaign, your ad is running on Facebook and you want to see the results of it all. The Ads Manager dashboard is the place for this but since there a tons of different options for ads, we’ll want to customize a couple of things on it in order to more easily see the data we’re looking for. By default the dashboard shows you a results column that lists a total of all of your conversions. Keep in mind that a conversion on a Facebook ad isn’t just a purchase event - it includes page views and add to cart events as well!
Let’s add some columns that show us specifics on each event that the Facebook pixel is tracking on your campaign. Click on the Columns dropdown and choose Customize Columns.
You’ll now get a huge list of columns that you can choose from. The three events that fire on Indiegogo campaign pages are viewContent, addToCart and Purchase. Select those from your choices here and click on Apply.
Awesome! Now we’ve got a dashboard that shows us everything we’re looking for! Feel free to modify things further to suit your needs, but this should get you going with the basic data that the Facebook pixel is collecting from your campaign.
Accuracy of Analytics
It’s important to keep in mind that although quite powerful, the Facebook pixel can only provide you with data on traffic that it sees. Many privacy conscious users have tools in their browsers that specifically block this kind of tracking. In addition, these tracking events occur on specific pages - if a visitor does not reach a certain page their traffic data will not be collected. If a user were to end their session before being redirected to Indiegogo, data on that conversion would be lost. Consider these cases when you’re comparing data between your Indiegogo Dashboard and the Facebook Ads Manager.
You should now be armed with the basics to start making use of the Facebook Pixel to provide more insights to your campaign and help push your digital marketing strategies to success!