The Facebook pixel—recently renamed the Meta pixel—is a small piece of JavaScript code you can place on your website. The pixel gives you insights into how your audience interacts with your Facebook Ads. It also provides data on how Facebook users behave on your website after they click on an ad.
Now, that might read like a bunch of technical gobbledegook, but what it means is that you can use it to know more about what your ads are doing.
If you are yet to activate yours, it is a very simple process for which you can find a thousand YouTube tutorials. It will take less than an hour of your time to set it up.
But what do you do with it then, and how can you use it to make more money and sell more book
The pixel on one of my Facebook (Meta) Ads.
The pixel on your Facebook (Meta) Ads sits there quietly monitoring the activity being fed back to it. From where? Well, from your website is arguably the best place, but you can embed your pixel other places too.
For instance, if you have a funnel story on Bookfunnel that you give away for free, you can apply the pixel to it, and Facebook will identify the customers and log their information—not in a creepy anti-GDPR way, but benignly. You can use this information to build an audience; Facebook will build an avatar based on the overlapping characteristics of the people who went to Bookfunnel to get your free story, which you can use to target your advertising.
This task is performed in your ads manager under the Audience tab. Click to create a new audience, then select “Website.”
To create a custom avatar of people flagged by your Facebook pixel, visit your ads manager under the Audience tab, then select “Website.”
This will take you to a new page. In Events, select “People who visited selected web pages,” take the URL from the page for your free book, name the audience, and that’s about it. The audience will take a few hours or maybe even a day to populate, but when it does, you will have an audience of millions of people Facebook has found that match exactly the characteristics of the people you attracted to your book—aka people who are likely to want to read your books.
To finish creating the target audience gathered from your Facebook pixel, select “People who visited selected web pages” in the Events tab, take the URL from the page for your free book, and give your group a name.
You can do much the same by writing a short story, putting it on a page at the back end of your website—not accessible from the homepage—and driving traffic to it from your newsletter, your social media, and through your books. It could even be a bonus chapter for your next release; it doesn’t have to be a complete story.
Using the pixel in conjunction with the online store on your website, you can keep track of customer data, understand who is buying what, what the average customer spends, and what your bestselling products are. This enables you to tailor your efforts and get that customer to buy the boxed set and merch, not just the single title they came for.
This type of audience has often proved to be my most successful. The traffic you send, and that Facebook records, is made entirely of people who like your books enough to be following you already.
However—and this is a big however—if you are moving into direct sales, the Facebook pixel is everything. The subject is too big for just one article, but we’ll explore it more in-depth in a future issue, and there are plenty of tutorials available for free via the internet.
Good luck!
Steve Higgs
When Writing Means Business, Storytellers Read Indie Author Magazine
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