How to install a Facebook Pixel on your website
If you’re a do-it-yourselfer business owner who’d like to track online activity to build and/or target an audience, there’s a little social media site that can help. Maybe you’ve heard of Facebook…yes? Well, I’m gonna show you how to install a Facebook pixel on your website and use the ginormous tracking power of Facebook to find out who’s checking you out. Ready? Let’s go…
First…open Facebook Ads Manager
You’ll need to go to your Facebook ads manager account found at business.Facebook.com – Then, click or tap the top menu button (it’s those three lines in the upper left hand corner) and select “Pixels”. You should see it somewhere around the middle of the page in a dropdown. The red arrows in the picture show approximately what you should see. Depends on your browser and device. Click or tap the word “Pixels”. (not in this picture…in your Facebook ads manager admin area)
When the next page opens (the Pixels page), click or tap the green button (or whatever color they happen to be using when you start this process) that says “Create a Pixel”. And Facebook will start generating your pixel.
After you click the “create a Pixel” button, you’ll see a popup where you can name the pixel and add your website URL.
Here’s the first part of the actual “how-to” install a Facebook pixel on your website
Once you name your pixel and insert your website URL, Facebook gives you some options for installing your pixel code. A Tag Manager OR the copy-and-paste method. You can also email instructions to your website developer. To keep it simple, we’re gonna copy the code to install on your website yourself. So, click or tap on </> manually install the code yourself.
On the next window, click or tap option 2 and hover over the code that appears after that. You’ll see a blue haze appear with the tiny words “copy to clipboard” in the middle. Click or tap that, and you’ll have the code you need for your pixel.
If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, contact me or your web developer.
NOTE: There’s another page or popup where you could choose a variety of event options to track. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m just showing you how to install a Facebook pixel without going into all those possible options.
And now that you’ve copied your pixel code, you just need to install it on your own website. Since there are so many hosting companies and login methods, I’ll keep it simple and say, login to the admin area of your website using your login info.
Then, go wherever your admin access to the Header code area is and paste your pixel code before the final head tag. It looks like this: </head> Once you’ve pasted it, click or tap “Save” and Bingo! You’ve got a Facebook pixel working for you.
More important than knowing how to install a Facebook pixel is how to test and monitor it.
To test your pixel, go back to your Ads Manager page on Facebook and select “Pixels”. If the status shows “active”, you installed your pixel the right way. Just know it could take 20 minutes or longer to be active. But once you see active, you’ve got one of the most powerful tracking tools there is right now…working for you and your business. And you can go back to your ads manager to set up tools to build custom audiences and even what they call “look-alike” audiences. But I’m not going into that here.
Just know this…once your Facebook pixel is set up correctly, you can vastly improve your ad targeting. And that vastly improves the bottom line of your ad spending. And who doesn’t wanna get more bang for their bucks? Can you see how this can truly help youcreate new leads for your business? And like I said, if you’d like some help…