Add a Facebook tracking pixel to your site in less than 5 minutes

I recently integrated Facebook tracking pixels with my website for two reasons. One, I wanted to know how to use this new but yet quite ubiquitous tool and I wanted to see if I could perhaps gain some insights into who is visiting my website and what catches their eye (or mouse, rather).

Facebook has made this process fairly easy to integrate with any website outside of Facebook. All you need to do is to create a Business account on Facebook and within your account there is a management option for creating Pixels. Once you have your pixel source code we can go about the implementation.

It's a standard integration as you might imagine connecting any other javascript app to your site. The source code from Facebook has a specific account number tied to your business account and serves as a beacon of sorts to call out to your dashboard when anyone visits your site or clicks on a specific URL or button. Once the pixel code is added to your page headers you can launch a test instance with Facebook and finish selecting triggers and correlating actions.

Facebook has made the integration particularly user friendly.

Next, we test our triggers and actions and wait to see if everything appears to be loading and connecting correctly.

Testing events in real time

Excellent! We are now seeing all the test events in real time. Everything is working correctly and we can move on to see our analytics.

Facebook tracking pixel dashboard data

This is exciting. Now we have a dashboard that is getting real time data from our Facebook tracking pixel. We can know when visitors are checking out our page as well as know what is of the most interest in regards to section titles or blog articles. In a business setting we can track sales, shopping cart quantities and basically any other standard and relevant marketing metric.

Anonymous, but detailed

And finally one additional point of interest is that the IP addresses are collected by Facebook but are anonymized and not returned to each individual business account administrator for this type of campaign tracking. This is great because we can gather the relevant data we need to help us cater to our clients and visitors while helping maintain user anonymity.