A topic that always causes digital marketers grief is how do we overcome some of the hurdles with the pixel for Facebook, specifically for retargeting ads if you have paid attention at all to Facebook ads, you know, in the last two years that the price of ads has gone up because of some changes that have taken place that you need to be aware of. So I thought I would answer as many questions as I could and try to simplify this concept as well as give you some tactics to overcome some hurdles that you might be experiencing with the Pixel and therefore you're targeting campaigns. So let's take a look. Let's dive right in. First off, let's review the era of the pixel. Basically, Facebook uses a pixel or a snippet of code on major websites all over the internet. And that re, that pixel will report information about any logged in user. That's visiting a site. It tracks all of your online behaviors your interests, the page visits, the things that you're watching, everything that, and it develops this complete avatar for everybody that is logged in as that pixel reports data back. So basically everything you're doing online goes into this persona, if you will, this personal profile for everyone. And that's how Facebook really became the, the custom audience King. It revolutionized being able to get a great cost per acquisition because it just knew everything about everybody. And so targeting people was exceptionally easy. In fact it got down to the creepy level where you've seen memes of people that say, you know, they get an ad for something they just thought about, when in reality it is because of their online behavior. Facebook knew they would be applicable for that advertisement. So everything was rocking and rolling with the pixel going right along, and then everything fell out. The bottom fell out because on iOS 14, they blocked the Facebook pixel from being able to communicate. That happened in September of 2020, and now users can opt to personal information tracking, but the after iOS 14, they were opted out by default, meaning that your, your activity, the online data that it's collecting is not being accurately reported back to Facebook. And so this led to you know, less ac accurate targeting. The remarketing campaigns fell apart, and this was especially true for mobile users. And to put that into some context, 59% of all online traffic comes from mobile users. So your pixel is you know, the, the September 20 update specifically impacted mobile users because their pixel couldn't hit them if they were using iOS. And, and to put some numbers around that, 49% of mobile users have an iOS device, and that that's US numbers, but that means your pixel is useless on half of your online traffic for mobile use. And so if 59% of all online traffic coming to your site is mobile and half of that is not being captured correctly by the pixel, that's a real problem that really did a number. And so let's add some perspective to this. Let's, let's take a website. Just pretend that it gets 25,000 hits per month visits and half of that 59% of that traffic is mobile. So that's 14,750 of these hits are from mobile devices. If 49%, approximately half of those are from I os, that means that there's 7,228 users that we're using like Apple devices, that means that the pixel is missing 29% of your overall web traffic each month. That's crazy. So if you rely heavily on targeting retargeting campaigns, you can expect to pay at least 29% more to acquire new customers. Well, what did that do to Facebook? You don't have to take my word for it. Let's just take a look at what the result was. If we look back at Facebook's stock on August 28th, it was in 2020, right before the iOS update, it was $293 and 66 cents per share, roughly $294. And then on October 12th, 2022, it was $127 and 75 cents. That means if you take those two figures, that that's a 56% decline in stock price. Now, it wasn't all because the iOS 14 update, there was some other things that helped in hurt them along that path. However, if we were to compare that NASDAQ was down 11% in the same period, which is a different way of saying that Facebook performed 45% worse than NASDAQ did during that time period. And, and the iOS 14 update did have a lot of of, of cause in that, right? So what did Facebook do? They had to do something in order to try to stop the bleeding or recover and so enter their their solution, which was their conversion api. And basically what a conversion API is doing is it's using data from these conversions instead of the pixel data, and it's reporting it back through server side interactions as opposed to client side. In other words, instead of your phone, because your phone is being, the pixels being blocked on your iOS device. So the phone, which is the client side, can't handle that data anymore. What they're doing is they're passing it back server side. So somebody visits your website and they convert on something. This is a big difference. It's not pack, it's not gonna be able to track page views and things like that, like the Pixel could. But what it can do is if you convert on something, you schedule an appointment, you register a free account, sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, whatever it is, then that visitor, it goes through your server, your server captures it, passes it through the API to Facebook server, which reports it back into your ads manager or business manager. So it's basically a different way of accomplishing the same thing, right? So that's great. So the conversion API is the answer to the iOS problem, right? Well, kind of because when it's coupled with a pixel, it's at least a partial solution. It is better than nothing, right? But it relies on conversion information as opposed to page load, which means it's relying on you to sign up for newsletter do something different. And it needs that like so as an example, you sign up for a newsletter and you put in your email address. And so the conversion API is gonna take your email address, report it back to Facebook server to the ads manager and say, John doet example.com just signed up. That's a conversion. Well, that works great if the user entered their email address, john doet example.com, and it's the same email address that they have in their Facebook profile, you already seen a problem with that. Well, my Facebook account's more than 15 years old and it's an old Yahoo account that I rarely use to sign up for literally anything. So that means that the conversion API information is often inaccurate, and there's some other downsides to it as well. Some of the other downsides are that there's an additional cost the server cost for like an AW AWS environment to stand this up is between 50 and a hundred bucks, depending on the amount of traffic you're you're getting. And it also requires a good bit of technological expertise. I could tell you that my team is pretty technologically advanced and it took us two phone calls with a Facebook rep to get it working correctly. So there is some downside and there's some upside to it. So is it worth doing? Well, let's take a look back at our initial example. Let's say that we got those 25,000 visits per month. 29% are missed by the pixel. Let's assume that the, the conversion API is going to miss 75% of people. Let's say you're just really, really you know, skeptical about its, its percentages of match rates. So 75% of the time we're gonna assume it's gonna miss, right? That that's a different way of saying 25% of the time it's still gonna hit. And that means that you're picking up an additional 1,807 visitors out of that. So that's, that means that either of 25,000 hits per month, 19,579 of them were successful data transactions between either the pixel or the conversion api. So in my opinion, it is worth doing, at least for now, but future updates to both the pixel environment and the conversion API could change that. There is talk that by the end of this year, by the end of Q1 of next year, that many of the browsers will follow the way that the iOS update did, and they will not load pixels or tags. So in that case, it may a lot may change. So is it worth doing, in my opinion for now? It is, it could change in the future, but is there another solution? Is there another way to arrive at the same destination? And for us to answer that, we have to understand the goal. And for us, the goal is custom audience segmentation. That's what the pixel or the conversion API or whatever, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get data back to your Facebook ad server so that your ads manager knows how to put you into custom audiences. As an example, if I buy a product, if I click on an ad and buy a product, they probably don't wanna show me the ad for that, that product anymore because I've already bought it. So stop paying to show me that ad because I've already purchased it. Instead, what you might wanna do is put me in a different custom audience that's getting an ad for things that are add-on products to whatever I just purchased, just as an example. So specifically for remarketing purposes, custom audience segmentation is key, and it also helps create lookalike audiences, which is gonna give us additional opportunities to make sales. And so in order to accomplish this goal of custom audience segmentation, I have found, and I believe that the future for Facebook ads, if you wanna get a high return on ad spend, it's best to capture data for users in the platform. And what I mean by that is, if like Facebook in this example, or Instagram, whatever platform you're in, Facebook knows exactly who they are when they're in Facebook, right? So if you're logged into Facebook and, and you're doing something within Facebook, there's no pixel or conversion API required because it's happening inside of their own platform. So of course they can track that. And therefore, I personally, I believe that the future will rely on us getting interactions within that platform. And that means we need likes, shares, comments, et cetera. And we need to be able to trigger off of those things. Like video viewership is one of my personal favorites. And when we get those interactions, we can start doing custom audience triggers based off of those interactions. And the key there is that it's happening inside the platform as opposed to outside and relying on a pixel or an API to pass the information back. So now that we have an idea of a workaround for this and, and what we're gonna do, the question is where would I do this? How would I get these interactions within the platform? And the first answer here is to go where your audience hangs out. So if I were to go into Facebook and search for roofers, if that's your cl, your whoever you're targeting, and I click on groups down here, you see out of these first five examples, and by the way, there's hundreds of examples hundreds of these groups, but just out of these, there was 141,000 people in those groups. So it's still a target rich environment if you can get into these groups where your, your audience is hanging out. So it it, and this works for business to business and business to consumer. You just have to find relevant groups that your custom audience would benefit from. And so some in platforms, tactics and strategies from this, we're gonna use these relevant Facebook groups and we're gonna go in there, we're gonna drop knowledge bombs. It is a white hat tactic. Follow me on this one. We're gonna set a video viewership as the trigger for a custom audience, and we'll go through that in just a second. But basically this knowledge bomb is gonna be a video that is not a sales pitch, it is not marketing, it is not sales, it is behind the scenes still white hat tactic because it's totally within the rules of Facebook's advertising policies. But what we are not doing is going and vomiting up a sales pitch on anybody because we want this to get high viewership. We wanna go provide a real solution to a common problem inside of these groups that people are going to like, that's also going to drive some of that organic engagement, like shares, comments, questions, discussions, sending it as a private message to a friend, things like that, right? So we're going to go drop these knowledge bombs as a video, and the video video's not gonna be salesy at all. I normally do it from a generic Facebook page and that that's going to drive maximum amounts of viewership. And then we're gonna use those video triggers to, to place these people into a custom audience. And it's really simple. When you go into your business manager and you're setting up a new custom audience, you simply choose video from the sources and then you set your viewership, you, you select your videos, and then you can say people who watch at least whatever percent. And as an example, if I was doing this on a you know, into a group and I had a group that was, you know, answering a question, how do you get leads? If you're a roofer, I'm going to drop a free knowledge bomb, not sales pitchy at all, just establishing myself as a subject matter expert, and then I'm also helping them solve a problem. I'm trying to drive maximum engagement, and I'm gonna tell Facebook, Listen, anybody who views at least three seconds of this video, I want you to drop 'em into my custom audience and now I'm gonna run custom and now I'm gonna run ads and do everything else you can do with custom audiences, right? From my, my audience my business manager, because everybody who watched that was in a roofer group. And if roofers are who I'm trying to get in touch with, obviously that's just another way of getting in front of them. So this is a fantastic way for you to be able to populate your custom audience based off of where we're your relevant users are hanging out, in this case, Facebook groups, and there's other options as well. You can set these video views to be on landing pages. In fact this works for not only Facebook, but also YouTube. So as an example, maybe I am setting up triggers on interactions and I want to lo or video viewership. I want to load on a landing page, both an embedded version of my Facebook and my YouTube video. And you can do things like set them both to auto play, but set one of them to to mute. So as soon as your page loads, it's playing the video that they wanna see. And if they stay there for more than three seconds, you've got them, they have viewed your video. It works for YouTube as well. And so you can, you can actually embed a YouTube video and if they watch it in, they're logged in, you, you've got 'em. So video and embeds on landing page is another way to go. Lead ad forms and lead ad forms have gotten a bad rap previously because they get a high quantity of leads, but the quality of the leads is just it's been very poor. But recently they have made some changes that have improved these lead ad forms. And one of the biggest changes that they've made is that you can actually qualify leads. What do I mean by qualifying leads? Well, you could actually set it up to where maybe you had a maybe you had a question in there that said, is your budget between, you know, less than a thousand dollars, between two and $5,000 between, you know, five and $10,000 or $10,000 or more? If I didn't wanna deal with anybody that was less than $1,000 if they selected that option, Facebook's not gonna consider them a lead for me, and so I don't have to deal with them. They have made some changes, it's helped improve them. The lead ad forms I think are a positive way of doing this, especially if you take advantage of that new feature. And then there's a little bit of a black hat method where you can scrape Facebook groups for members. I will probably not go into too many details about this in this video, but basically what you can do is you can, you can scrape the membership from those groups. It works the exact same way as you getting the video viewership, but you're basically scraping the Facebook group for the members' emails, and then you upload that list as a custom audience. And normally you can get somebody to do that with about 50 to 60% accuracy. So in our example, we found 140,000 users between those five groups, that would be 70,000 email addresses you could load up as a custom audience. So that's a black hat option. We might do a completely separate video on how you can go about that, but that's another way that you could consider doing it if you so choose. Now, what can we do with these custom audiences? Well that kind of goes outside the scope of this video, but just to touch on it with this, all this data we've talked about, we can build out our custom audience that we're gonna target with ads. And so these can be customer lists, specific actions like viewership, et cetera. And from that we can say, Okay, if somebody viewed this ad, I wanna start, or if somebody viewed this video, I wanna start throwing them ads. That's what you can do with a custom audience. And also you can set up lookalike audience, which is basically other potential customers who match the criteria. So if I had 70,000 email addresses, I loaded in and they're all roofers, and I said, Hey, Facebook, create a lookalike audience based off of, you know, what these 70,000 people have in common. It's gonna build out another, it's gonna build out a group that's likely roofers, right? They work for roofing companies. And also you can set up retargeting campaigns. So in other words, you can show different ads to people who who take a specific action add to cart, but they don't check out that, you know, would be an easy one for either the pixel or the conversion API to pick up. Another one would be if they were to engage with a certain video, then you can start showing them another video. So let's say you had a video blog as an example, and they, they view episode one and you want them to view episode two. Well, maybe you start throwing an ad that was the second video to them after they have viewed certain percentages of your first video entry. There's a lot you can do with custom audiences. I highly recommend you play around with it. But basically what I wanted to do was talk you through in a post pixel world with a pixel losing its effectiveness at least for the immediate future, it looks like it's gonna continue to decrease in its value. These are ways that you can actually continue to target people effectively inside of the Facebook platform. So Facebook, Instagram, instant Messenger, WhatsApp, their entire MATA network, whatever they're calling it now without having to rely on the Pixel or the conversion api, both of those are still very valuable, at least at the time of this filming. But this gives You some other options to be able to target people while they're still inside the platform. I hope that helps. If if you enjoyed this, please like it to, you know, engage however you can on this video. If you've got any questions, please feel free to reach out to us and we'll look forward to talking to you. Thanks all.