How We Made $57k With Facebook Ads

The real winner of this story is the Facebook Pixel. If you’re running Facebook Ads and you don’t have your Facebook Pixel set up correctly, or set up at all, you could be wasting a lot of money and missing out on some seriously easy business growth.

Yes we know that might sound a little dramatic, but we’ve seen the results an effective Facebook Pixel can achieve, so we know how much of an impact it can have on your business.

For example:

  • In the last 2 months, one of our clients has seen a 128% increase in sales as a result of the Facebook Pixel we’ve set up for them
  • And another has increased their monthly Facebook sales from $8,200 to a whopping $57,670 in just 3 months!

Do we have your attention now?!

So let’s dive into the world of pixels and find out what they are, why they’re important and how you too can utilise them to grow your business.

What is a Facebook Pixel, anyway?

Quite simply, it’s a data tracker. It’s a series of code that connects your Facebook Ads with your website, so you can follow your audience and track their movements.

Sound a bit creepy? When used correctly, it’s actually a way to offer a more personalised and enjoyable experience with your brand.

Think of it as a personal shopper. Rather than your customers having to trawl the huge department store that is the Internet and your website, trying to find exactly what they want (if indeed they know what that is), your personal shopper pixel will show them the things it thinks they’ll like and guide them through the buying process. Ultimately making it as easy and efficient for them as possible.

What does a Facebook Pixel do?

A Facebook Pixel allows you to gather valuable data about the people who visit your website, and use it to increase your reach, target the right audiences and stay connected to people who have shown an interest in your brand.

Ultimately what all this means is you have a much greater chance of achieving your business goals (whether that is to increase awareness, engagement or conversions) and get a decent ROI.

More specifically, with a Facebook Pixel you can:

Optimise Your Ad Campaign

When running a Facebook Ad Campaign without a pixel, the only conversion you can optimise for is link clicks. That’s all well and good, at least you got them to take action, but in order to grow your business, you need them to take more powerful action in the form of a sign-up or purchase.

This is where your pixel comes in:

  • It will allow you to optimise your Facebook ads for the specific conversions that are more aligned to your business goals, such as signups and purchases. So it will show your ads to the people who are more likely to take these actions. It’s important to carefully consider which event you want to optimise for your ad, as what you choose affects who sees your ads and therefore affects your desired outcomes.
    • For example: If you choose to optimise your ad for landing page views, your ads will be shown to people most likely click through to your selected landing page.
  • It will allow you to optimise based on the types of people in your audience and what you want them to do. So when you run an ad to an audience, Facebook won’t show your ads to all of these individuals. Facebook does this intentionally, as they optimise to show your ads to the people in that audience most likely to perform the action that you want.
    • For example: Let’s say you’re a homeware brand who specialises in sourcing unique items from around the world, and you want to use Facebook ads to sell your products. You set your Facebook audience as women in your area, aged 35-60, who are interested in luxury homewares and travel. This will give you quite a large audience size, so you don’t want Facebook to show your ad to all of them, as you’ll have to pay for that. By utilising the Pixel, however, Facebook searches for individuals in your audience that are most likely to make a valuable action, aligned with the event trigger you have selected for your ad campaign. So as you can see, pixel optimisation doesn’t just save you money in the long-term, it gets you better results all round!

Retarget Your Website Visitors

Unless you catch a customer at exactly the right time, they’re not likely to buy immediately. They might simply be browsing, they might be comparing you against your competitors, or they might just get distracted. Whatever the reason for them to leave your website without taking action, you want to be able to stay present in their mind – so when they are ready, they come back to you (and not your competition!)

Your pixel will allow you to stay connected with all the people who have visited your website, by retargeting them. So it will continue to put your brand in front of them, and can even get super specific by showing ads and products or services that relate more specifically to them – because the pixel knows what they looked at on your website and what they’re interested in.

This, of course, increases your chances of improving conversion rates, and therefore gives you a much greater ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).

Create Lookalike Audiences

With all the data your pixel gathers from your website visitors and retargeting, you can create a lookalike audience of people who have similar interests and are in a similar demographic. Since they’ve visited your website you can probably assume they have some interest in your product or service, so by targeting their lookalikes it means you can reach a much wider audience with more confidence that they’re likely to engage.

Create A Custom Conversion

This enables you to gather very specific data and get a much more in-depth understanding of your audience. With a custom conversion, you can track how people interact with your website after seeing your ad, and measure unique activities. With this information, you can then optimise your ads to leverage their behaviours and their buying preferences.

For example:

  • If most people take action on a specific page of your website, you can create an ad that sends them straight to that page
  • Or if they buy more frequently from their mobile rather than desktop, you can focus on optimising your mobile site

How do I set up a Facebook Pixel?

While Facebook has made it as easy as possible to get your pixel setup, there are quite a few steps and variations depending on your business and what you want to achieve.

You can, of course, find different guides for each step at the Facebook Business Help Centre, but to get you started our resident Social Media Expert, Kat has a few helpful tips.

1. Access the pixel setup pages

Go to Events Manager through your Facebook Ads Manager account and click on Data Sources

2. Add the code to your website

You have the choice of using a Partner Integration or adding the code manually.

  • A Partner Integration can be more user friendly, as Facebook will guide you through the process and automatically set up the pixel based on the type of website and business you have, i.e. Shopify or WordPress. If your website doesn’t appear on the Partner Integration list, you’ll have to add the code manually
  • Manually adding the code can give you more control, but of course, you have to do everything yourself. If you choose this route, you can simply search for the code and instructions online. Kat always prefers to use this method as she finds it more efficient, but of course, she’s a pro!

3. Check the Pixel has been installed

To do this you can do one of two things:

  1. Go to the Test Events tab in the Facebook Events Manager page and enter your website URL. You can then navigate through your website and check the pixel records your actions
  2. Kat’s top tip – install the Facebook Pixel Helper extension on your Google Chrome. This will show you if the pixel is installed on each website and page as you visit it

4. Tell the pixel what to track

If you’ve used a Partner Integration, your Pixel will have set up some predefined events, however, if you’ve gone the manual route or you want to set up custom conversions, you must set the Pixel up to track these.

5. Set up your Ad Campaigns

Kat recommends setting up two campaigns simultaneously – one for acquisition and one for retargeting. This will allow you to truly optimise your campaign because the pixel can firstly bring them to the website and then track them if they leave without taking action.

Your Pixel is a critical piece of your campaign puzzle, so it’s important you get it set up before you even think about creating a campaign. Otherwise, you’re likely to spend a lot of money and not get a decent result, because you’re essentially just casting a big net and hoping you catch something. Whereas the Pixel will get much more specific at targeting the right audience for you, so your net will be cast in a much smaller and more appropriate pool.

6. BE PATIENT!!!

This is Kat’s biggest piece of advice. She likens a new pixel to a new baby – at first, it has no control and doesn’t know what it’s doing, but over time it matures as it learns and understands what it’s supposed to do.

According to Kat, it’s best not to expect any valuable results within the first couple of months while you give your pixel time to mature. Think of this as your Pixel’s training period – you wouldn’t expect your favourite football team to simply go out on the field on competition day and win, they need to spend the months before training and getting themselves into peak condition. It’s the same for your Pixel.

Of course, the more you spend the quicker your Pixel will mature – but if you don’t have a big budget then a little patience will definitely go a long way.

Remember the examples we gave you at the beginning? We achieved the 130% increase in sales after two months with a budget of $200 per month. Prior to month two, the growth was slow.

Still Not Sure Where To Start?

As I’m sure you can appreciate, the key to a highly effective Pixel is continuous monitoring, testing and adjusting. Not to mention pairing it with a killer Ad! All that takes a certain level of expertise, and of course time – something I’m sure you’re already in short supply of!

That’s where we can come in. Kat lives and breathes all things Facebook and Social Media here at Oddball HQ, and as you can see she gets amazing results for our clients.

So if you’re keen to turn Facebook into a conversion machine for your business, we recommend reaching out and having a chat to see how we can help. 

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