In this tutorial, I will teach you how to install a Facebook pixel on your wordpress blog, as well as setting up and creating custom audiences from your facebook business manager account, but in order to do that, we will be needing the following tools:
- Pixel Your Site plugin (free or paid, though what I’m going to use here is the paid version)
- Facebook Business Manager account
Why Use Facebook Pixel
Most of the times, you will encounter online visitors that will go to your site, read some of your contents then leave without doing anything like signing up to your newsletter or buying your products.
I experience this myself and I sometimes wonder if these visitors will ever come back again for a second or third time, and as you may know, if you have not installed any retargeting tools on your blog, you can just say goodbye to these visitors forever!
To address this problem and future “lost” opportunities, what you need to do is to set up a retargeting tool on your blog, and in my case, since I am a huge Facebook user, my retargeting tool of choice is the Facebook Pixel.
Facebook pixel is a great tool that you can use to retarget your past website visitors via paid advertisement on Facebook, and with the fb pixel, you can do the following:
- Set up laser targeted custom audience based on your parameters
- Extend your reach by creating Lookalike Audience from the custom audience
By the end of this tutorial, you will already have an idea on how you can set up the following by yourself:
- Locating your FB pixel id
- Installing and setting up the pixel (using pixelyoursite plugin)
- Creating custom audience using the pixel
- Creating lookalike audience using the custom audience
So enough of the talking and let’s start!
Step 1: Installing the Plugin
Pixelyoursite is a wordpress plugin that can install the FB pixel on your wordpress blog with just a few clicks, and not only that, it has a feature where you can use tags and categories to sort your pixel data.
This plugin has a free and a paid version. You can go to this link to read my review of Pixel Your Site
Step 2: Locating your Facebook Pixel ID
You will need a Facebook Business Manager account to get a pixel. You can get your pixel by logging in to your business manager account then going to this link.
Once there, you can see on the right hand side your Facebook Pixel ID
If you still have no Facebook pixel, you can create one by going to the business manager navigation menu, then click “All Tools” then under Settings, select “Business Settings”
Once there, select “Pixels” on the left screen menu
After that, click “Create Facebook Pixel” on the upper right side of the screen
A pop-up will appear which will direct you to enter your pixel’s name. Just enter any name you want, but make sure to make it relevant (not necessary though as long as you can remember this in the future). Press “Next” afterwards
After the setup has finished, you now have your Facebook pixel
If you still have no business manager account, you can go to this link to sign up and create one for free.
Step 3: Installing the Facebook pixel
Now, that you already have your pixel, all you need to do is to copy your Pixel ID to your WordPress blog via Pixel Your Site plugin
Step 4: Setting Up Pixel Your Site
I currently use the settings below on my blog:
General Event Enabled with all parameters turned on. I also put a load delay of 0.1 second so the pixel won’t fire for bouncing users
Search Event, Traffic Source Tracking, and Advanced Matching are all enabled
Step 5: Checking if everything is correct
To determine if you have set your pixel correctly, you will need a google chrome browser then install the pixel helper add-on
Once you already installed the add-on, browse to your website using google chrome, and then once your website has loaded, you will notice the icon at the upper left hand corner of the browser will get activated (turns blue with a little green square at the lower right corner with a number inside, denoting the number of pixels loaded), which means that the pixel has loaded. See image below for reference
Check the details to see if all are correct.
Everything seems perfect so we can conclude that we have properly set up the Facebook pixel on the blog, it’s time now to create your custom audience
Step 6: Setting up Custom Audience Using GeneralEvent Pixel
The GeneralEvent Pixel is a feature of the Pixel Your Site Plugin which helps in creating laser targeted custom audiences by using post meta data such as categories and tags
To set up a custom audience using the GeneralEvent Pixel, you will need to logon to your business manager account then select “Audiences” in the Business Manager Menu, see image below for reference
Once you’re on the Audience page, click on “Create Audience” then select “Custom Audience” from the drop down list
A pop up will appear. Choose “Website Traffic” from the selection
After you selected Website Traffic, you will be sent to the next step where you need to choose where you will get the data, you have several choices here but for this tutorial, we will select the one coming from one of the events which is the “GeneralEvent” pixel (see image below for reference)
I also choose the maximum days for the pixel data (which is 180 days) before the traffic data gets removed from your pixel
For the audience name, just enter a relevant name so that you can properly identify this custom audience in the future
By the way, the GeneralEvent pixel will not show up immediately when you have just set up the Pixel Your Site plugin on your website, you have to wait for some time while the pixel is still collecting data from your website visitors.
After you selected “GeneralEvent”, you need to click on the “Refine by” text, then choose “URL/Parameter” from the list of options (see image below for reference)
Now, this is where the magic happens. This is the part where you can now filter your audience with laser targeting precision by utilizing the pixel parameters generated by the Pixel Your Site plugin. You can see below several of the parameters, but in this tutorial, we will primarily focus on the two most important parameters which is the “tags” and “content_category” parameters
tags – the plugin can parse the tags of your post so you can use whichever tags you would like the pixel to get data from.
content_category – the plugin also grabs category data, so you can create audience filtered by your categories.
By mixing and matching these two parameters, you will be able to create a highly targeted audience that matches your criteria
In the example below, I created a filter from the tags (wordpress) and content_category (tutorials). This means that GeneralEvent pixel will collect all the data from my visitors which visit any of my posts under the “Tutorials” category with a “wordpress” tag.
Once finished, just click “Create Audience” and your custom audience will be added on your list of custom audiences
All you have to do now is send traffic to your blog post so that your custom audience will get populated with pixel data.
Step 7: Creating Lookalike Audience from your Custom Audience
This is actually the coolest part of using the Facebook pixel because with this feature, you can expand your reach even further by creating a lookalike audience based from your custom audience, which is actually what you want if you’re into getting more targeted visitors for your website.
With the lookalike audience, facebook will try to collect data from facebook users in a particular location which matches with the behaviors of your custom audience, so if I create a lookalike audience based from my previous example, Facebook will try to gather people who are interested in tutorials about wordpress.
But there is a catch here because in order for Facebook to properly generate your lookalike audience, your pixel needs to already have an ample amount of data with a minimum population size 100, but honestly, I would recommend a lot more (more than 1000 if possible) so that the generated lookalike audience will be more precise.
In, this tutorial, we will not be able to use the custom audience that we created earlier, so we’ll just use another one which I have created before which is my custom audience for video marketing.
You can see from the screenshot below that my custom audience for “video marketing” has already 200 “pixel fires” on it which is already enough to create one, but as I have told you earlier, I recommend a much higher population before you create one.
To create a lookalike audience, just read along below:
Click on the “Create Audience” then select “Lookalike Audience”.
Next is to choose the source, which in this example is my “video marketing” custom audience. For the location, you can select any countries or region you want to target. In my example, I’m going to choose “United States”.
For the audience size, you can select anything here, but remember that the bigger your choice is, the lesser it’s matched from your source, so if you want a more accurate lookalike audience, select the least percentage. In my example, I only chose 1% which will generate about 2 million lookalike audience.
When you’re done, just hit the “Create Audience” button
You’re actually done after the above step. You can already see the lookalike audience that we created on the audience list
You can see however that the lookalike audience is not yet ready, so we just wait for a while for it to get populated. In my experience, it normally takes about a minute to a few hours before the lookalike audience gets populated so just do some of your others tasks for the mean time while waiting for facebook to collect data for your lookalike audience
After a while, I hit refresh on my browser and you can see now that our LAA has been populated with a size of about 2.1 million
And that’s basically it! You can now use the audience you created for your Facebook promotions. The good thing about this is you know that it’s a highly targeted audience because these audiences are based from your website visitors, which you can safely assume are very much interested regarding your topics.
Wrapping Up
I guess that wraps up this tutorial. If you have not yet utilized the power of retargeting pixels, I recommend you to try this one out as you are really leaving a lot of money on the table if you didn’t. If you are short of cash for the pro version of Pixel Your Site, they actually provide a free version which I believe is still a very potent plugin that you can use so there is really no excuse to not have a retargeting pixel on your site.
If this tutorial helped you, I would really appreciate if you share this post so it can reach more people who might be in need of help. If you have other ideas or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact me or just drop your comment below
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