Ever go to your favorite shopping website or travel website looked around and left only to notice a post on your favorite social media platform featuring the same website you just visited? How did they know I was on that website?
Social media advertisers are using a powerful tool called pixels to measure, optimize and re-target ads. Combined with clever marketing strategies pixels can be used in a variety of ways of attracting and retaining customers.
What are pixels and how are the used? Pixels are small programs installed on websites that collect and relay visitor information to social media platforms. They are currently used on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to send carefully constructed ads to your social media accounts.
There are many uses for social media pixels. Here are a few of them:
“Abandoned cart” is a term used in e-commerce when a visitor adds items to an online shopping cart then for some reason leaves the site without purchasing them. Using Facebook pixels you can target a social media post to the person who left with the ad featuring the product(s) they selected. This gives the visitor a second chance to think about purchasing the item online.
A more clever use:
A hiking and camping store located in the Sierra Mountains in Northern California with an e-commerce website to sell its products. They wanted to increase their online sales as well as their foot traffic into their physical location. Knowing the bulk of customers who visit the area the store decided to do an online promotion targeting people who live in the San Francisco Bay area with an interest in hiking and camping to its website. When people visited the website a Facebook pixels program started sending information about each visitor to the store’s Facebook ads account including device information. This was important because the store started a second Facebook ad campaign targeting the people who earlier visited the website. This ad was only triggered when a customer is located at a certain distance (using GPS on their device) from the store. The ad offered a free guide to the best of hiking trails in the area if they visit the store. This gave the opportunity to increase foot traffic into the physical store and a potential to sell something that was needed, forgotten, or on the fence about buying from the website.
Powerful stuff.
This type of digital marketing is not limited to large advertisers. Having a partner with the knowledge, experience, and marketing creativity, social media pixels can provide focused effective digital marketing in your next campaign. Reach out to us to see how we can help build a sophisticated digital marketing strategy.