What does Facebook Pixel mean for Marketing (and Google Analytics)?

I run a Digital Agency where, among other things, we manage our client’s social media marketing. As I was running an ad for one of our clients in the Ads Manager, we picked up something interesting called Facebook Pixel (Not conversion or audience Pixel)

Facebook Pixel (A smart Facebook tool that allows you to track, report on customer activity and then re-target advertising to the customer’s Facebook feed) launched earlier this year as a replacement to both the Conversion and audience tracking pixels. The new tool effectively combines the power of the Conversion Pixel and the Custom Audience Pixel into a single pixel. You can use it to measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns, and no longer need to implement the Conversion Pixel and Custom Audience Pixel.

How it works

Facebook Pixel allows you to choose parameters you would like to track, the target audience as well as detailed information of your customer’s activity on your website, then uses the information to targeted advertising to them (The customer) based on which part of the customer acquisition cycle they’ve dropped out from. After selection of parameters to track, it then generates a piece of code that is pasted in your website’s header, similar to google analytics (Google’s version of web activity tracking) and also track the parameters separately.

What does this mean for marketers?

This means that marketers can now better observe customer behavior on their clients’ websites and use that information to analytics (to understand their customer base, their needs, their behavior towards the product as well as the user experience of the website through the detailed data collected). This allows for more accuracy when coming to data-driven marketing in terms of Facebook.

With Facebook’s user base at a steady 1.55bn users, this provides an excellent platform for marketers and companies to reach an even wider audience, thus through targeted advertising and other Key Performance Indicators, yielding a higher Return On Investment.

Does it have the ability to take on Google Analytics?

With Facebook’s current user base at 1.55bn users, one would think this is enough right? Wrong! And here is why:

• Facebook Pixel’s dynamic re-targeting tool is only truly effective if the customer is logged does not log out of their Facebook accounts after every session (which most customers don’t) but it’s just something to point out.
• If a person sees a Facebook ad for your product and doesn’t click, but later browses your website and decides to purchase, Facebook is able to attribute this conversion to the Facebook ad the person saw. Google Analytics is unable to achieve this.
• You won’t get tangible leads directly from your Facebook pixel, so you’ll need to place the leads conversion on a webpage that has a place where people can fill out a form to generate leads that way. A conversion pixel will only report how many people landed on the webpage you’ve installed your pixel after having seen your ad.
• Google Analytics is more open-ended and advertises to customers on different websites as opposed to Facebook Pixel which provides more dynamic advertising but is limited to Facebook and perhaps in the future Facebook-owned companies i.e. Instagram and Snapchat.
• One thing we cannot take away from Facebook Pixel’s tracking platform is the ease of management.

Conclusion

In terms of having to make a choice between the two, it’s just best to have both. Facebook’s Ads and Pixel Analytics tool is best for customer retention. That’s mainly due to its ability to provide smarter advertising through its dynamic advertising feature (Communicating a message to the customer based on the purchase step in the purchase cycle they’ve dropped out of) whereas Google Analytics, although it may be a bit less dynamic, is good for Customer Acquisition than retention.

At OSD Marketing, we provide contextual marketing, brand activation, campaign management and insights from the different creative teams we have partnered with across the continent. Amongst a host of services, we also offer Contextual Marketing, Content Marketing, Brand Architecture, Paid Media Advertising (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube Advertising) through our packages. We partner with our clients as their Outsourced Marketing team.
We are very passionate about marketing, that is why we will help you engage with your customers in a way that is meaningful to them and value-creating to you.