If you’re relying on paid advertising to get new people to your website, i.e. drive more traffic, chances are you’re using Facebook ads. And if you happen to be one of those people that don’t measure the true effectiveness of their Facebook ad campaigns, then this article is for you.

Read along as we discuss the Google Tag Manager Facebook Pixel setup process. This is quite a lengthy topic, so buckle up, and let’s do this.

What is the Facebook pixel?

The Facebook pixel is Facebook’s solution for marketers who measure the traffic to their website and track it in relation to their Facebook ads. It’s a strain of JavaScript code that you can attach to your site.

Once installed, Facebook will be sourced with all the necessary data about visitor behaviour on your website. The advantages of installing the Facebook pixel are many, including the following:

Tracking conversions

A conversion is a very important action for businesses operating online. It refers to when a user completes a specific action. That can be a sign-up, a subscription, a purchase, etc. By tracking your conversions closely, you’ll be able to tell if X number of visitors completed the action in a specific period of time. This equals better, more accurate reports.

Custom audiences

Remarketing is a strong point of Facebook’s advertising platform. And with the Pixel, you get to retarget people based on past actions. It can be anything from people who scrolled for a while on your site to those who abandoned their cart. The possibilities are endless, and the potential for regaining these people is there.

Track revenue

Installing the Facebook pixel to your site means you can implement dynamic tracking, which allows you to track confirmed revenue.

Cross-device conversions

Measuring your conversions across many devices is a great way to keep track of your audience. Say, for example, a user sees your ad while they’re at a doctor’s appointment. Will they make the purchase right there? Not likely. If they’re interested enough, chances are they’ll make the purchase later on in the day using their computer. The Facebook pixel allows you to keep track of such activity.

Google Tag Manager – What is it?

The Google Tag Manager is a tag management system (duh!) or TMS that allows you to quickly and easily update measurement codes known as tags. Once the strain of code is safely and properly deployed on your website or app, you can access analytics and measurement configurations using the interface.

Here is a boiled-down example of how this works. Information from a data source (your website, for instance) is shared with another data source (Google Analytics) using the Google Tag Manager. So, think of it as a handy tool that allows you to store and manage a bunch of code.

And whilst the Google Tag Manager isn’t necessarily the easiest tool to use out there, it has made the process of managing analytics much easier than before.

Google Tag Manager Facebook pixel setup

The process of adding the Facebook pixel code to Google Tag Manager is quite straightforward. Just follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Google Tag Manager account
2. Select your website and then click on “Add a new tag”
3. Now, click on Custom HTML Tag, then give your tag a name. Make sure the name is related to Facebook so you can easily find it later
4. Now, go to the Facebook Events Manager. Down at the bottom, click on Add Events
5. In the options that show up, select From a New Website and then click on Install code manually
6. There, click on Copy Code to grab the entire pixel base code
7. Now, return to the Google Tag Manager and then paste the code into that HTML box
8. Click on the Advanced Settings dropdown menu, then select Once per page under the tag firing options
9. Under Fire On, click on All Pages
10. Now click on Create Tag.
11. You can create tags for other actions following the same method.
12. Once you’re done, click on Publish and Tadaa!

Creating tags for specific action

Once you have the pixel code installed, you can start creating tags for all the different actions that you’ll be tracking.

Here is a list of the different Facebook pixel events that you can add to your Google Tag Manager:

• View content: when a user visits an important web page (landing page, for instance)
• Add to cart
• Add to wishlist
• Contact (phone call, email, chat, SMS, etc.)
• Donate
• Checkout
• Purchase
• Schedule
• Subscribe
• Etc

The events that the Pixel allows you to track truly are endless.

Anyway, back to how you can add tags for these actions:

1. First off, head to Google Tag Manager, select your website, and then click Add a new tag
2. Click on Custom HTML Tag and give it a clear name. For instance, the tag for Purchases should be called…Purchases (duh!)
3. Now, input the specific event snippet. For instance, if you’re tracking Add to cart actions, the event code would be fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’);. Here’s a list of all the different standard event codes
4. In Advanced Settings, select Once per event under the Tag firing options tab
5. Check the box under Tag Sequencing and select your base code tag
6. Select a proper trigger for your site under Fire On, then click on Create Tag
7. You’re done! Follow this process for all the other events on your website
8. Once you’ve added all the tags, double-check them, then click on Publish

Checking if the Facebook pixel is working

Many marketers set up their pixels and go on with their day thinking it’s all up and running. However, the tiniest error in copying and pasting the code, for instance, can ruin everything.

Anyhoo, the simplest and most straightforward way to check whether your Facebook pixel was added to your website or not is to use the Facebook Pixel Helper extension.

This extension will show you whether your Pixel is active or not and will help you figure out any other issues your site might have. In case the Pixel is properly working, the extension’s icon will turn blue and show the exact number of active Pixels on the website.

If you want to be extra careful, you can always check the IDs of the installed pixels using the extension and make sure they match those in the Events manager. Your pixel’s status should show as Active, and you’ll see activity reported in the dashboards.

In conclusion, the Facebook pixel is a great source of data about visitor activity and their many interactions with your website. Such data can be used to tailor your Facebook ads to specific segments based on their activities.

It also allows you to closely monitor conversion rates and improve your ad performance which would eventually improve your return on investment (ROI).

How to use the data

A big question that might arise from all of this is how exactly you use the data you just got your hands on. Well, for starters, you can create custom conversions. These allow you to track more specific customer actions.

For instance, you can filter all the different purchases made just to show those of men’s clothing over £30. This, in turn, enables you to optimise your ad delivery and reach people who are likely to perform these specific actions.

Secondly, the Facebook pixel data can be used to create custom audiences based on actions. In other words, you can easily retarget ads to audiences who have performed certain actions, such as adding an item to their cart without making the purchase.

Consent is key

Facebook pixel this, Google Tag Manager that, let’s talk real business here – user privacy. In this day and age, with numerous privacy regulations such as GDPR, you can’t really do any of this without consent.

In the case of Google Tag Manager, for instance, you can set up your tags in a way that they only fire if a visitor gives their consent. This is done through what’s known as a cookie consent mechanism. We recommend that you check this guide by Google for more on this.

Anyway, once you have properly implemented your consent mechanism, you’ll then need to sort things out on Facebook. Luckily for you, they have added a neat feature that allows tags to continue firing even if consent was not given. The catch here is that you won’t get the data from those, but if the user were to decide and give consent, you’d get it.

For more information about how to implement this on Facebook, head to this page.

Too technical? We can handle it

Like it or not, but paid advertising includes plenty of technical mumbo jumbo. Worry not, though, as you don’t need to go through it alone. Book a discovery call with us today, and we’ll show you how our Facebook ads experts can help!

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Google Tag Manager Facebook pixel set up – FAQs