New Facebook Pixel: Standard Events vs. Custom Conversions
January 30, 2016
Overtime, using both the conversion pixels and custom audience pixels has become quite the pain. It’s messy and not as effective as they truly could be. Fortunately, within the last year, FB has combined the two into one easy to use Pixel that tracks both traffic as well as actions on specific pages.
Like the older pixels, which FB will be officially retiring mid 2016, the new FB pixel will still be placed on every page of your site, but unlike the older pixels, the new one can be altered based on actions occurring on the page. In order to setup conversion tracking with Facebook’s new Pixel, you can go about doing it two ways: Implement standard event tracking on the web pages where you seek to measure specific actions, or create custom conversions.
While standard events require you to add more code and parameters to the initial Facebook pixel on your site, setting up custom conversions is only a matter of adding URL rules.
To go this route, head over to the Ad Manager and bounce over to Tools>Custom Conversions>Create custom conversions.
Add the URL that you’d like to track.
After you’ve given your conversion a name and description, add a conversion value. For example, if your conversion amounts to a user making a purchase, add the price in order to measure your return on ad spend.
You are now ready to create a new campaign with your custom conversion tracking in place!
Based on the actions users take on your pages that are tracking conversions, your ad will be optimized to show to users who are more likely to convert. This is a huge benefit to the delivery model FB uses. They want you to get the most conversions at the lowest cost. So the more conversions you get, the better FB can be at predicting at what users your ad will be shown to.
It’s also important to note that standard events are more reliable than custom conversions, however they can’t get as granular with tracking specific conversions as custom conversions can. For example, if you wanted to track users who viewed your products, you could use a standard event to track those actions. But if you wanted to track a users who viewed specific product pages, using the URL in a custom conversion would be the way to go.
While custom conversions may be easier to set up, let’s take a look at standard events and how to set them up.
Go to the FB pixel page in Ad Manager>Actions>View pixel Code. Under ad conversion tracking you’ll see standard events. These events represent actions that are taken on your site
Choose the standard event that best represents the type of conversion you want to measure.
After you’ve chosen which events you want to track place the standard event snippets within the initial FB pixel on their respective pages.
Voila! You are now ready to begin tracking conversions and better advertise towards your business goals.