Seasonal

4 Reasons for Why the Facebook Pixel is Crucial during the Holiday Season

Sanne Kruis

The Marketing Manager of The Next Ad.

Oct 12, 2017

The period between October and December is the time when consumers spend most of their money on presents for their friends and family. Since they don’t always know what they are looking for, you can help them by retargeting them. Via the Facebook Pixel you can exactly do that. In this blog we give you four reasons for why the Facebook Pixel is so crucial during the holiday season.

4 Reasons for why the Facebook Pixel is crucial during the holiday season

The period between October-December is every advertiser’s dream and nightmare at the same time. It’s the time of year when people go shopping, when advertisers go all out on their advertising strategies and when competition is increasing. With competition rising and people more eager to buy products and services, it is crucial to target the right audience during the holiday season. The other week, we gave you insights into the different target audience options. Today, we dive a little bit deeper into reaching the right people and give you 4 reasons for why the Facebook Pixel is crucial now more than ever.

What is the Facebook Pixel

As you might have already learned from our blog about the Facebook Pixel (how and why to use the Facebook Pixel), the Facebook Pixel is used to drop a cookie that will track visitors on your website so you can reach out to them later, also known as retargeting. Once you advertise to people who have already been on your website, you can also use the Facebook Pixel to track their behaviour when they’re back on your website. This helps you to find out what ads are most effective. Now that you know that the Facebook Pixel is basically a small piece of code that tracks website visitors, you might wonder why the Facebook Pixel is so crucial right now, at this specific time of the year?

1 Track what's happening outside of Facebook

The first and most important reason to why the Facebook Pixel is crucial during the holiday season is because you want to find out what is happening outside of Facebook. Without the Facebook Pixel, you can’t track traffic. The Facebook Pixel helps you to track how visitors interact with your website and how that relates to your Facebook advertising campaigns. This way, you can easily track who is visiting your website and use these Audience insights to get an idea about the demographic, location and purchase behaviour of your website visitors. The Facebook Pixel also lets you see how users interact with your website and how visitors switch between devices, like a phone or desktop. For example, you are able to track whether people see your ads on mobile but then switch to a desktop before buying your product or the other way around. By being able to track your conversions, you can refine your campaign strategy during the holiday season and easily calculate your return on investment.

2 Retarget website visitors

By now, you are probably aware that you can use the Facebook Pixel to retarget your website visitors. Why would that help you to get more conversions during the holiday season? Well, it takes a few touches for a customer to get familiar enough with you and your products to take the next step and buy them. People hardly ever buy a product on the first website visit. This is when the Facebook Pixel becomes useful. You can use it to retarget people that have visited your website and remind them who you are through retargeting. When you create your Website Audience, make sure that you retarget people who have at least spent more than 2 minutes on your website. Someone who spends more than 2 minutes on your website is a more relevant prospect than someone who has been on your website for only 10 seconds. When you retarget ads to people who have already visited your website, you can show them an ad for the exact product that they have added to their wishlist on your website or a product that they have abandoned in a shopping cart.

3 Build Lookalike Audiences

By tracking people that have visited and interacted with your website, you can get an idea of your ideal audience. And by knowing your ideal audience, you can go ahead and create Lookalike Audiences (once you have created website custom audiences), automatically via our Automatic Audience Creator. Use the tracking data to build a Lookalike Audience of people who have similar likes, interests and demographic to people who have already been interacting with your website. Indeed, you can use the Facebook Pixel to ensure your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to take your desired action. This way you can expand your potential customer base and get more conversions during the holiday season.

4 Get rid of abandoned shopping carts

Among online marketers, abandoned shopping carts are a recurring problem. According to eMarketer, almost three-quarters of shopping carts worldwide remain abandoned. Potential customers are likely to put a product in a shopping cart and leave your website without completing the purchase. Does this also sound familiar to you? With the Facebook Pixel, you can solve this problem by following up with potential customers who were so close to buying one of your products. You just need to extract the data gathered from the Facebook Pixel and retarget your Website Audience. Moreover, you can also use a combination of Dynamic Ads with data extracted from the Facebook Pixel to easily create ads to promote the exact same product that is currently sitting and waiting in your potential customer’s shopping cart. In the end, what your prospects need is a nudge to go back to your website and complete that long-lost sale. You can even offer them an incentive such as free shipping or a discount so that they overcome the challenge that has led them to forget about the shopping cart.

Success Story

To illustrate how useful the Facebook Pixel is during the festive season, take the example of Facebook’s success story of ‘Love Your Melon’ – an American apparel brand. Its goal was to increase purchases of their beanies by not only new but also existing customers. Via the Facebook Pixel, they could optimise their ads to reach people most likely to buy their beanies. By creating a Facebook Pixel they could easily track the actions that people took, such as making purchases and used the data from top customers to create custom audiences from their website. Read more on audience targeting options in our previous blog on how to reach the right audience.

Conclusion

The time during October and December is the time when consumers spend most of their money. People buy presents for their friends and family. Since they don’t always know what they are looking for, you can help them by retargeting them. Via the Facebook Pixel you can exactly do that: find out who is visiting your website, see how your customers are moving between devices, run and retarget people that have visited your website, create (multiple) Lookalike Audiences automatically based on your website visitors so you can target more people who are similar to your best customers. Use the holiday season as an opportunity to make your business stand out. When you understand and integrate the Facebook Pixel, it can really make the difference in having a successful holiday season.