You've seen success with Google Ads, but don't want all of your eggs in one basket. So you need to set up Facebook Ads, but first need to make sure you're tracking Leads.

You're running the ad campaigns for a product that helps people monetize their blog content by inserting upsell links automatically. You've made Google Ads work but there's limited search volume for your product, so you want to test Facebook Ads. First thing that's needed is a tracking pixel.

A tracking pixel sends information about activity on your website back to ad platforms or analytics tools. This is usually to track the performance of marketing campaigns, movement through the conversion journey, or the usage of certain product features. It historically takes the form of a 1x1 pixel image that loads when the page loads, but usually now it's several lines of JavaScript code. 
Facebook Ads along with all the major ad platforms provide their own tracking pixels. Primarily they're used to track the number of conversions your campaigns have driven, so that you know the value of your marketing campaigns. However data on which users are converting is useful to find more users that have similar profiles, improving the performance of your campaigns.

Tracking Pixel

Thanks for taking on the Facebook launch, I'm really expecting this to work well
If you talk to the IT team, they should be able to give you access to Google Tag Manager
That will let you set up tracking pixels on the site without needing a developer
We need both the base pixel on every pageview, and an event that fires on every new demo request
Think you can handle that?

Before tag managers existed, every tracking pixel had to be manually added to the website code, each time you wanted to track a new channel. This would sometimes mean anything from 1 week to 3 months wait while the IT ticket got prioritized (and marketing is never the priority for developers!).
Then several tag managers were launched which let you inject the relevant code directly on the website, without bothering an engineer. Google Tag Manager is by far the most popular solution because it's free, but there are other options like Segment, which offer advanced functionality.
Whatever tool you use, Tag Management works off the same 3 core components: Triggers, Tags and Variables. Triggers dictate when a tracking pixel fires: it can be an event on the website, clicking a button, or loading a page. This lets you add multiple tags on the same trigger, so there's consistency across all your analytics and ad accounts. Tags are the actual tracking pixels, and Variables are any dynamic data you need to pass to the ad platform or analytics tool.

Google Tag Manager

It's tempting when you're setting up tracking to decide to track everything. Set it up once, and then you never have to worry about tracking again... this is a mistake! Don't overcomplicate things, because it's highly likely even a 'perfect' tracking setup will need to be changed at some point in the future. Focus on getting the simplest possible setup done first.

American Statistician

Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.

New Channel, Who Dis?

We need to get the Facebook (Meta) pixel on every page of the website, and a conversion event on the Demo Request page. We'll need to use Google Tag Manager to set this up.

We need to install the Facebook / Meta base pixel on our site, so it can start tracking who uses our site and find similar people to target in our campaigns.

You should have access to Google Tag Manager now
Let me know if you run into any problems!

The most important thing to do when setting up a new Facebook (Meta) ads account is to install the tracking pixel. This goes on every page of your website, and is essential to ad performance. It tracks the number of people who visit your website after clicking on an ad, and also can let you optimize to people who reach a specific page. It also lets Facebook see who's visiting your website, so it can build profiles on other similar people to target, making your ads perform better.

Facebook Tracking Pixel

You have 4 triggers set up in Google Tag Manager, on which one should you install the base pixel?

As well as the base pixel which appears on every page, you want to identify actions that users can take that are valuable to you. This is key to tracking and reporting on the value of your marketing campaigns. Tracking conversion events let's you optimize your campaigns to get the greatest return on investment (ROI), or lowest cost per acquisition (CPA). It also tells Facebook (Meta) which actions on your site are most valuable, as well as which users are more likely to commit them. This helps with targeting as more signals are gathered about what types of users make good customers. To add conversion tracking usually requires a bit more advanced setup than just installing the base pixel, but it's worth it for the extra visibility and performance you get.

Conversion Tracking

Hey this is a quick overview of Google Tag Manager, just at the high, concept level
You have over here tags, triggers and variables - that's the 3 things you need to learn about Google Tag Manager
The tags are the actual code snippets, pixels that you're going to set up for your website, for example here I have my facebook pixel
The triggers are when those tags fire - so if you copy and paste the facebook pixel in and you want the pixel to fire on certain pages, or all pages, the triggers is where you do that
The trigger that most people use for everything is all page views
Theres other things you can do, as well as pageviews you can also fire on clicks
You can say, only if they click class contains something
If I went into my website and I wanted to track this button - I can go to right click and then inspect
Then I can look and I can see that has a class of button w-button
So if I want to track all the buttons, I can add button w-button and its only going to track when someone clicks on that button
That's how the triggers work
Once you set up the triggers then you can fire multiple tags off each trigger
That makes a really big difference to making sure that all of your tags are firing at the same time
Another type of trigger you can do is form submission
I have some forms on the website, and the ID of the form, which again you can find just looking at the code, the id is wf-formContactForm, which tracks when that form is submitted, which is a bit more reliable than button clicks
The final thing I'm going to show you is variables
We talked about click classes and the way we tracked the button click was the click class, and that was a variable
but we can also use the variables in the tag
So if you wanted to for example, send some information on what the text of the button was, you could choose click text as the variable and then put that into the tag
Let me just find a google analytics event
We can do Category button
Actions click
Label we can pull up the variables here and say we want the button text
You can see it puts it in double curly braces, that's how you know its a dynamic variable
Hopefully that's helpful!



Which of these Standard Event names are the best fit for our Demo Request event?

The name you choose for your tracking event does actually make a difference! Facebook trains the algorithm to look for the type of customers who have converted on similar conversion types, when targeting for your campaign. So if you chose 'Purchase' instead of 'Lead', you'd be attracting eCommerce consumers instead of B2B buyers!

You're setting up your custom event in Google Tag Manager, but what type of trigger makes the most sense?

Inspecting the code in your browser (right click > inspect) for the Demo Request form, you can see the form ID to use in your Google Tag Manager trigger. This method can also be used for finding the class or id of a button you want to track clicks of. If you get lost in the code, simple right click on the element you want in the browser and select inspect again, and it'll highlight it in the code. You can also just press control + f to search the code for the text of the button or form, then scroll up or down from there to find the relevant id or class.

Inspecting Code

Find a button on your website (or a popular website in your industry) and inspect the code. What id or class did you find? Detail your process.

It looks like the tracking pixel is firing now
Great job with this!
Looking forward to launching

Setting up the Meta pixel

You're looking to decrease your reliance on Google Ads, and want to try Facebook. As a B2B software tool it's important you're optimizing to the right leads, so you need to add pixel tracking to the Demo Request Form.

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