The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that allows Facebook to load data, such as the movements and actions of your ticket buyers, so that you can measure conversions. Conversions appear in the Facebook Ads account and also in Google Analytics, if linked, and can be used to measure the effectiveness of your conversion funnel or to see if your ads on Facebook have actually led to ticket sales.
Creating a Facebook pixel ID
Go to https://business.facebook.com and create an account. In the Facebook Business Manager you manage everything to do with Facebook: you can see it as your main entry point. From here you can also click through to your Facebook Ads Manager. This is another environment exclusively for managing, creating and viewing advertising campaigns: here you create an advertising account for your website. To measure conversions, you need the Facebook Pixel. You can find this under 'Ads management' in the following way:
At the top left, click ‘Ads Manager’ and then ‘All Tools’.
The menu opens and under 'Measure and report' you can click on 'Pixels'.
When the new page opens, click ‘Create a pixel’ at the bottom.
Give the pixel a name, for example: ‘Pixel from Stager’.
Click 'Continue' and Facebook will create your Pixel.
A new menu opens, in which you click on 'Manually add pixel code to website'.
Under point two you will find the Facebook Pixel ID, you only have to extract the number that you find behind 'init' in the following way: 'fbq('init', 'xxxxxxxxx');
Now you can add your Facebook Pixel to your Google Tag Manager. We've already created a container, where you just need to add your Pixel ID and you're done. Read here how to do that.
What do the Facebook Pixel and Stager measure?
The following data is kept for each completed order:
The total amount of the order (incl. VAT).
List of tickets in the order, per ticket type (early bird, regular ticket, etc).
Number of a type of tickets in the order.
ID of the ticket type.
Ticket price (incl. VAT).
The customer path in the checkout process.
This data is used for overviews in your Facebook Ads Manager and in Google Analytics, if linked.
Facebook Ads Manager
With Facebook Ads you can measure all kinds of things, but the following three conversions are most relevant for the ticket shop:
View ticket selection page: visitors from Facebook who viewed the tickets and prices pages. This is the Facebook track parameter: ViewContent.
View payment overview: before the visitor makes a purchase, they see the payment overview in the shopping cart. The tickets have been selected but the purchase has not yet been completed. This is the Facebook track parameter: InitiateCheckout (initiate payment process).
Made a sale: a visitor has gone through the entire conversion process and has bought a ticket. Additional information that is provided is value (value of the order) and currency (euros).
Facebook track parameter: Purchase.
Facebook conversions can be seen in Facebook Ads Manager under 'Campaigns'. You can see this by adjusting the columns at Campaigns, as shown in the image below.
You also have the option to apply for remarketing within Facebook. Read the article about Facebook remarketing.