When you start an advertising campaign for your business or organization, you want it to function with the greatest efficiency and precision. Otherwise, you are just wasting money. Precise advertising has never been easier with Facebook’s business platform and Pixel. These techniques allow you to create specific custom audiences for your advertising campaigns and target these audiences (and their lookalikes) with the right message at the right time.

Custom audiences are the foundation of precise Facebook advertising campaigns. These audiences are created using a number of factors. Pixel-driven campaigns are primarily developed using event tracking. When the pixel code is entered onto your website’s header, it functions on every page, tracking data and events. However, you must specify the events which you want the Pixel to take note of for your campaigns.

There are three types of events that can be tracked using the pixel:

• standard events, which are visitor actions that we have defined and that you report by calling a pixel function
• custom events, which are visitor actions that you have defined and that you report by calling a pixel function
• custom conversions, which are visitor actions that are tracked automatically by parsing your website’s referrer URLs

Standard events include the following actions:

• Add Payment Info
• Add To Cart
• Add To Wishlist
• Contact
• Customize Product
• Donate
• Find Location
• Initiate Checkout
• Lead
• PageView
• Purchase
• Schedule
• Search
• StartTrial
• Submit Application
• Subscribe
• ViewContent

Custom events are events that you can create and specify. For example, if you want to track every time a customer views a particular collection of products for more than one minute, Facebook allows you to do so. With custom events, you can specify a wide variety of events that allow you to better target an audience on Facebook with a particular message.

Custom conversions are particular conversion events that you can also specify for creating audiences. For example, you might create a specific thank you page for certain product purchases. Then you can create an audience of whoever has viewed that page.

The advantage of creating these custom audiences is twofold. You can advertise to these existing customers AND you can create lookalike audiences on Facebook to advertise to customers who are likely to have the same buyer behavior.

If you are advertising on Facebook, your website must have the Pixel installed to develop these custom audiences. Otherwise, you are likely wasting money on your advertising campaigns.

Not sure if you are using the pixel properly on your site or if your custom audiences are engineered correctly for precise advertising? Contact Cote Media today. No one has more experience than us with social media advertising.