What is the Facebook Pixel?
You’ve probably come across it before if you’re recruiting via Facebook, but what exactly is that Facebook Pixel? Simply put, it’s a tiny snippet of code that you can add to your website. This snippet will track, trace, and store all sorts of information about your website visitor’s behaviour. When a site visitor performs clicks, scrolls, or moves around, the pixel triggers into action mode. The information it stores will have an important role in the next step.
Retargeting
Does the term ‘custom audience’ sound familiar to you? No? We’ll clarify it for you!
The Facebook Pixel assists you to define and set a custom audience. Suppose you want to show everyone who has visited your vacancy page a specific ad. Facebook offers the possibility to create a custom audience of all visitors who viewed your vacancy page! So how does Facebook know who’s in your target audience? Take a shot in the dark… It’s that Facebook pixel again. Retargeting is very common in this context. You can easily retarget those who clicked on your ad and visited your vacancy page earlier.
To clarify: you won’t know who visited your vacancy page. You don’t get that data. Facebook owns that information and allows you to retarget these leads through custom audiences you create using the pixel.
Increasing Ad Performance
If you don’t measure your campaigns’ effectiveness, you’ll never really know if all your hard work is paying off. You’ll know which ads perform well based on cold hard data, but that’s it. This is where the Facebook pixel comes in as a warm bath of information that helps you finetune the effectiveness of your ads.
You’ll find extensive statistics and details about the behaviour of your website visitors on the pixel’s dashboard. A few examples: the time of day on which users are active, how many new vs how many returning visitors you have, the (approximate) location of your visitors, and via which device visitors have entered your website (mobile or desktop), … 📈
Tracking conversions
You can learn valuable lessons from your visitor’s behaviours and actions on your website. The pixel will, for example, show which ads lead to conversions (candidates), and which don’t. You will, however, have to specify what a conversion means to you beforehand. This is called an ‘event’ for the Facebook Pixel. If you’d like to know via which ad candidates are applying, you can create an event on the page where candidates land after completing their application. In a way, you’re telling Facebook: ‘When candidates land on this pace, they’ve applied. They’re officially a conversion.’
A disadvantage to the pixel (yes, there’s always one!) is that you get very little information about how visitors interact with your website. The pixel doesn’t tell you for how long visitors have looked at a certain page, or whether they’ve visited other pages as well.
That’s why we always recommend using Google Analytics alongside the pixel if you want to know how your leads are navigating through your website.
Pay attention, though! When you’re using a Facebook pixel, it is very important to state this in the privacy statement on your website in order to legally comply.
Convinced of the importance of the Facebook pixel? Don’t ponder any longer, and find out how to install the pixel here. 👀
