You might have heard that adding the Facebook pixel to Shopify is a great way to reduce your ad spend, measure your advertising success rate, and re-target customers.
But what’s the best way to integrate it? How do you use it to maximum effect? And what exactly is the Facebook pixel for Shopify anyway?
In this guide, we’ll explain the hows and whys of the Meta pixel (which used to be called the Facebook pixel) and show you exactly how to set it up to get the most out of it.
We’ll cover:
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The Facebook pixel is “a piece of code that you put on your website that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.” according to Facebook themselves.
Or, in other words, it’s an analytics tool that tracks your visitors’ behavior. You can benchmark this behavior against the actions you want your ad traffic to take on your site.
Although the pixel sits on your website, what it’s measuring is the success of your Facebook advertising campaigns.
It analyzes how visitors use your site by tracking certain actions, which are called events.
After the company’s recent rebranding, the Facebook pixel is now called the Meta pixel.
A full list of events tracked by the Meta pixel can be found here. Some of the most important actions that your site visitors take that the Meta pixel tracks are:
Events are broken down into two types: Standard and Custom.
Standard Events are the default actions that the pixel tracks without needing any special instructions.
Standard Events consist of a pretty extensive list of actions. When you’ve first installed the pixel, you should start by tracking these.
But if you need to track something that’s not listed as standard, the Meta pixel also gives you the flexibility to set up Custom Events.
Shopify merchants use custom events when they want more visibility into what visitors are doing on their stores. For instance, a particular link you want visitors to follow or a button you want them to click.
Tracking events gives you insights into how customers behave on your site and if they’re taking the desired actions.
If you set up your events properly, you can use the information to strengthen your Facebook and Instagram ads.
The way this works is by segmenting customers into groups.
You identify a particular event, and then create a group of all customers who conform to this event type, and then optimize your ads for this group.
Or, to put it another way—everyone who takes a particular action on your site gets put in the same advertising group, allowing you to target your ads more effectively (more on how to do this later).
For example, if, after logging enough events, you identify that a significant proportion of your customers are bouncing at the add-to-cart stage, you can set up ads to re-target those who leave your site after having added to cart.
There are many analytics tools that’ll allow you to track the behavior of your site visitors.
But what makes the Meta pixel different from other trackers is that it sends the data from your store straight to Facebook.
This allows you to:
In addition to this, you can track your events and conversions to build a picture of what your customers are doing across your site.
Again, all this info is sent back to Facebook to inform the ads that are shown to those customers.
Integrating this capability into your Shopify store has several benefits:
Analyzing what your customers are doing on your site, and what actions they do and don’t take, will help you understand them a lot better.
The data the Meta pixel shares with Facebook and Instagram makes it possible to fine-tune the audiences you’re targeting with advertising campaigns.
Because you know a lot more about your audience, the cost of Facebook ads will be much lower. No need to cast your net so wide—you can be more specific about what you advertise, and who you advertise to.
By setting up events and conversion tracking properly, you can see how well your ads are working (we’ll have more on this later).
Having an analytics tool that feeds information back to Facebook helps you in two crucial ways:
You can see what ads are enticing Facebook users to visit your store. Once on your site, you can see if these visitors are bouncing, browsing, or buying.
If too high a proportion of ad traffic isn’t converting, you can tweak your ads until more of it is completing purchases.
If you’ve been tracking enough events and conversions, you’ll be able to tell Facebook to optimize for particular actions you want visitors to take on your site.
Let’s say you’ve identified that people who scroll more than 60% down your landing page are more likely to buy from you.
You tell Facebook to optimize for scroll depth (i.e., show ads predominantly to visitors who scroll further down your site).
The Meta pixel works by hanging out in your store and logging every time someone takes an action that you’re tracking and sharing this data with the platform.
You can use the pixel data to improve your Facebook and Instagram ads by setting up audiences based on these actions.
There are two main ways you can set these audiences up.
Custom audiences are audiences that you advertise to that you have customized with specific attributes.
One of the most significant features of the Meta pixel is that you can use it to inform the choices you make when creating custom audiences within Facebook.
There are other ways to create custom audiences, but using hard data from how actual customers behaved on your site is a powerful way to maximize returns on your ad spend.
You can choose to target groups of Facebook and Instagram users who’ve also visited your store. For example, you could target visitors that:
There are several other attributes that you can use to create custom audiences.
You can group these visitors together and re-target them based on the actions they took (or failed to take) on your site.
It’s a powerful tool when trying to re-engage customers and one that allows you to be a lot more precise with your advertising.
Being more precise also makes it more efficient, allowing your advertising costs to come down.
Building custom audiences based on common criteria also gives you the possibility of advertising to other Facebook or Instagram users with similar characteristics.
Once you have decided on the criteria for grouping your audiences, you can get Facebook to create lookalike audiences that share some or several of the characteristics with your custom audiences.
This also offers a way to get more for your advertising dollars, as it puts your ads in front of people who are much more likely than average to respond favorably to them.
Since 2021, Apple users have been prompted to opt into data sharing when they download an app or visit a site for the first time.
This is part of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATT), which makes it harder to gather data on your customers.
Apple now blocks off-site information from being shared with apps. Instead, it uses in-app or on-site data to inform marketing choices.
This has implications for how the Meta pixel gathers data on customers using iOS devices. The data gathered from these customers can’t be sent directly from your site back to Facebook to inform ad targeting.
In response to these limitations, Facebook has introduced Aggregated Event Management.
This allows you to track up to 8 events during a single session and send them back to Facebook.
This is still a big compromise on the previously unlimited events you could track, but considering almost one-third of global mobile users are on iOS, it’s still well worth engaging with.
One way of helping you maintain accurate data post-iOS 14, and subsequent iOS updates is by using Facebook’s Conversions API.
It was launched in response to Apple’s privacy updates. But with the imminent changes to Google Chrome’s third-party cookies policy, the Conversions API will become a much more important tool for Shopify store owners.
The Conversions API sends first-party data from your servers to Facebook.
So instead of transferring browser data to Facebook—which in many cases would fall foul of data privacy protocols—the Conversions API shares data that your customers have opted into sharing.
It’s important to note that the Conversions API isn’t designed to replace the Meta pixel—rather, it’ll complement it, with gaps in the data being filled by the API data.
Having the best data and the widest spread of information on how your customers behave will give you the best results from your ads.
It’s important to know how to create a Facebook pixel and set it up properly to get the most out of your data.
So here’s our step-by-step guide on how to create or find your Facebook pixel and add it to Shopify.
The first thing you have to do is find your Facebook pixel ID. You can do this by opening your Facebook Events Manager admin panel and connecting it to your Shopify store.
Select ‘connect data source’ (next to the green arrow on the left-hand panel) and then tell Facebook where you want to pull your data from.
You’ll want to select ‘Web’ as the source as you’ll be pulling info from your Shopify store.
You’ll now be prompted to name your pixel. You can call it anything you want.
Once you’ve given your pixel a name, you’ll be asked to enter your web address so Facebook can check if it can be integrated—if you have a Shopify store, it’ll be supported.
Then you need to choose how to connect your site to Facebook. For the reasons we’ve outlined above, you should choose the ‘Meta pixel and Conversions API’ option.
Next, you’ll be given the option of setting up with a partner (Shopify) or manually installing Facebook pixel. By far the easiest way is to choose the partner option.
You can then select Shopify from a list.
Congratulations! You have now created your Meta pixel for your Shopify store.
If you’re creating the pixel for the first time from within Facebook, that’s all you need to do on the Facebook side.
If you haven’t already, make sure you have the Facebook and Instagram sales channels added to your Shopify store. You can do this in a few simple steps from your Shopify admin panel.
First, go to Preferences and scroll down until you see the Facebook Pixel section.
Click Set up Facebook and you’ll be taken to the setup page:
Once you’ve clicked through the various options in setting up your sales channel, you’ll be prompted to select your data preferences (for a full rundown on how and why you should set up a Facebook and Instagram sales channel, see our expert guides.)
It’s up to you to choose how much of your customers’ data you want to share with Facebook.
If you select Maximum, you’ll be able to target your ads more accurately but remember, in Europe and California, you’ll need to ask for permission before you share data.
When you’ve chosen all your Facebook preferences, you can now add your pixel to your Shopify store.
You should see your pixel ID listed on the next screen:
If you don’t want to go through the Facebook side, you can create your pixel entirely through Shopify.
You’ll notice in the above image that, in addition to the option to add your pixel ID, you can create a new pixel.
If you haven’t followed steps 1-3 and have chosen to start at the Shopify admin, you can create your pixel here.
As soon as you add the Facebook pixel to Shopify, you’ll be able to understand your customers better, create better-targeted ads, and consequently, reduce your ad spend.
Setting up standard and custom events and creating audiences from them to advertise to will go a long way to boosting return on ad spend.
But to really maximize your results, there are a few other things you can do:
We’ve already touched on the difference between custom events and custom conversions.
It might seem like a very fine-grained difference, but custom conversions track specific URLs rather than actions your visitors take.
So when your customers visit a certain page, you can get the Meta pixel to log this as a custom conversion.
Using custom conversions gives you a more granular view of visitor behavior and so greater control over your ad targeting.
While tracking an event will tell you, for example, if a customer has bought a product, tracking custom conversions will tell you which exact product the customer has bought.
This can be very useful when deciding which types of audiences to target with different types of ads. You might want to target your more expensive ads to higher-value customers, for example.
Using conversion tracking is what lets you see how your ads are performing.
You can see what proportion of traffic is coming to your site via ads and measure your conversions against your ad spend.
It gives you a clear picture of how well your advertising is working.
Dynamic ads are so-called because they change depending on the customer viewing them. To use them, you’ll need to share your product catalog with Facebook.
Once you’ve done this, Facebook will automatically display ads containing strategic products (usually, those viewed, or added to cart but abandoned) to your target audience.
When your visitors do click through from your carefully-optimized Facebook ads, you need the pages they land on to be aligned with the ad content.
Shogun Page Builder allows you to create as many landing pages as you need to fit any campaign.
That means you can design bespoke pages for your ads and ensure continuity of customer experience, whatever ad they click on or product they’re interested in.
Using an advanced page builder offers features like content syncing, bulk updating, and store-wide reusable content so you can scale your site to match your increased Meta pixel ad traffic.
It might seem like a complex process to set up your Meta pixel and add it to Shopify, let alone monitor the behavior of site visitors through Facebook.
But once you get your head around the technical details and start getting data through, it’ll hand you a huge amount more control over your Facebook and Instagram ads.
Adding the pixel increases the accuracy of your ads, allows you to create more tightly focused audiences, and reduces your ad spend.
It’s a powerful tool in your quest to scale your brand and build your customer base, and one you should take the time to master.
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