It’s highly likely that your advertisements are reaching beyond just one platform. A “cross-platform” or multichannel digital marketing approach is usually the key to success for businesses. Reaching more people is made possible by utilizing your website, organic and paid search rankings, paid social media campaigns, partner programs, email nurturing, and potentially even live reads on podcasts your prospects enjoy. That’s not all, though. You can provide a more customized advertising experience to leads already in your sales funnel by utilizing a variety of ad channels. This strategy helps you avoid falling victim to changes in algorithms, such as the latest Facebook News Feed modifications. Diversification is beneficial. But how can you ensure that all of your channels collaborate to make your full-funnel online advertising plan more effective than the sum of its parts? The answer is Facebook. The advertising pixel and event monitoring features of Facebook enable you to increase the effectiveness of all of your marketing channels. You can enhance the effectiveness of each channel at your disposal by creating tightly knit, highly focused audiences using custom event monitoring, rules and exclusions, and a well-designed Facebook ad account structure. This post will explain how.

Leveraging the Facebook Pixel & Custom Conversion Events

To start, let’s go over some essential details about setting up the Facebook Pixel and setting up Events…

What is the Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook pixel is a JavaScript snippet that you embed across your website and landing pages.

When visitors land on your pages, the pixel is triggered. This enables you to monitor conversions, retarget customers, and develop audiences - all from within the Facebook Ads Manager platform. Check out nexus-security’s tutorial on tracking and targeting on Facebook if you need assistance installing your Facebook pixel.

Defining Custom Conversion Events

By modifying certain variables within the default pixel code, you can track certain occurrences on your website. For instance: A customer makes a purchase on your site and clicks the “Submit payment” button. You can configure Facebook to record that as an event in its system. You can even design unique events for purchases of a certain value or for a certain quantity of items in a shopping cart.

Why is this so crucial? Because it allows you to retarget customers who have completed particular activities with specialized offers, remove them from campaigns, or generate lookalike audiences based on their characteristics. The granularity that Facebook gives you makes it simple to upsell, cross-sell, and identify fresh leads who resemble your company’s best converters ever.

UTM Parameters and Achieving Success in Multichannel Marketing

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals, let’s look at how the Facebook Pixel and custom Events may be integrated with all of your marketing channels. You probably already employ Facebook ads and have your Pixel set up on your landing pages if you’re reading this article on this blog. While this is useful from a general standpoint, it prevents you from segmenting your audiences according to their sources. This might be problematic if, for example, you want to display different advertisements or provide different follow-up offers to visitors who arrive at the same page on your website from a social media platform versus a nurture email. Utilizing unique UTM parameters is the best method to accomplish this without creating a thousand duplicates of every page on your site. Actually, Facebook provides a super simple free tool to assist you in creating these unique strings for your URLs.

Your Facebook account will be simpler to structure and you’ll be able to provide the most relevant offers to your prospects if you’re more methodical about your source-specific URL parameters. I strongly advise you to start using UTM parameters to provide your campaigns or web pages unique URL slugs if you aren’t already.

Building Audiences on Facebook for Individual Channels

You may build channel-specific audiences on Facebook if you use UTM parameters, as previously explained, to distinguish between traffic sources. You can design your Facebook account to provide highly targeted offers to specific audiences with zero overlap by combining rules and exclusions (more on those in a moment). Folks, it doesn’t get much more specific than this. Go to Ads Manager and choose “Custom Audience” under “Audiences” to get started:

Choose “Website Traffic”:

From the dropdown option, choose the “people who visited specific web pages” option:

You can choose a date range and define an audience that solely consists of people who have visited the page you’ve chosen. What ramifications does this have? Let’s examine some of the ways you can leverage highly specific audiences…

Remarketing to Non-Converters

Remarketing to non-converters entails giving your initial offer another opportunity to convert, despite the fact that it may sound like a marketing cult torture method. Let’s say someone clicks on one of your paid search campaign ads and navigates to your landing page. They look around but don’t make a purchase. You may reframe your offer to that audience on Facebook using more engaging ad creatives to better promote your demo, trial, etc. Here, it is crucial that your URLs and UTM parameters are structured properly. Your marketing channels can coexist simply on a single platform, and because you are aware that these individuals have already rejected you (at least) once, you have the freedom to be a little more inventive with the content.

Increasing the ROI of Your Paid Channel Ad Spending

Paying for clicks and landing page views via paid search and paid social media can feel like a waste of money if they don’t result in a conversion. You can transform clicks into audiences that you can leverage and use strategically in the future with this strategy.

And while we’re on the subject of clicks… You probably already know that specialized audiences made up of prospects who visit comparable sites on your site at the same time and from the same source have something in common. Audience definition (check), ad relevance (check), and anticipated feedback all have a direct bearing on the Facebook relevance score, a gauge of ad engagement that influences your average CPC. When you divide up your audiences, you have better control over all three. This is a no-brainer because doing so can reduce your cost per click, which is especially important at a time when Facebook CPCs are rising as a result of Newsfeed changes.

Upselling and Cross-Selling to Current Customers

By developing audience-specific strategies, you can grow your customer marketing and upselling initiatives. You can customize the message and promotion according to the particular product lines or service variants that your customers are divided into using this strategy. This is similar to how you would with email marketing, but instead of fighting for attention in a crowded inbox with only a subject line, you are doing it on Facebook and Instagram.

Setting Up Rules and Exclusions for Your Facebook Audiences

It can be a successful tactic in and of itself to create audiences out of people who visit particular pages on your website. However, you must filter out users who you are certain won’t convert, have already converted, or would be better served by a different offer altogether in order to design Facebook advertisements that are even more effective. Let’s imagine you launch a successful campaign and drive traffic to a landing page that is really successful (because you’re awesome, right?). Some people convert, but a sizable portion do not. You therefore begin remarketing. You’ll want to filter out consumers who have already converted on your prior campaigns to make sure you’re spending your hard-earned money on prospects who haven’t already. This will enable you to focus on those who have yet to accept your offer and free up some of your resources to concentrate on moving past converters further down your funnel. To accomplish this, you’ll need to define a website audience that consists of users who have visited particular pages, just like we did before. However, this time you’ll want to include the destination or “thank-you” page that visitors were taken to after completing your promotion. In your upcoming endeavors, this can then be applied as an “exclusionary” audience:

Now you might be thinking, “Hey Brett McHale, what if I don’t have a destination page but instead people get an email or something else of a complex and nuanced nature after clicking submit???” Relax.

As I indicated before, the solution is to use Facebook Pixel events. Like in the example below, you can choose an event just like you would a URL from the audience creation flow:

Now, using Offline Events, you can advance rules and exclusions if you’re running a more complex business.

Facebook allows you to monitor conversions, develop custom audiences (and exclusions), and advertise more successfully using data from a variety of sources, including CRM systems and in-store transactions. Pro tip: To quickly expand your funnel, create lookalike audiences based on custom conversions and website events. You’re welcome.

Naming Facebook Campaigns & Ad Sets That Are Channel-Specific

These audiences have been established, so it’s time to develop separate campaigns for each. Consider each audience you’ve built (or each distinct marketing channel), and then develop a campaign for each. Keep in mind the overall objective of each channel when doing so. Conversions will often be the main objective. An illustration of what I’m referring to is as follows: Campaign name: Paid Search –>Ad set name: Paid Search LP Audience –>Relevant Ads Campaign name: Partners ——>Ad set name: Partner LP Audience —–>Relevant Ads Campaign name: Website ——>Ad set name: Pricing Page Audience —–>Relevant Ads The benefit of using this structure is that you may tailor both your budget and creative to the precise activities of a particular segment of your database by adding numerous ad sets for each channel. You can design advertisements that are significantly more pertinent to that audience if each channel has a number of marketing campaigns, web pages, and landing pages connected with it.

Final Thoughts: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Facebook Ad Campaigns

The secret to evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns, particularly when using audiences made up of potential customers who enter your funnel from other marketing channels, is to understand the connection between the surface level (Facebook) and your marketing operations (back-end) data. You should reflect your back-end reporting in the way your Facebook account is set up, no matter what system you use. The ultimate objective is to make the entire procedure as straightforward and seamless as possible. By doing so, you can ensure that what you observe in Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, etc. is accurately reflected in your Facebook data. Although every company’s marketing and sales procedures may differ, I think that mastering the creation of precise, channel-specific audiences and Ad Sets in Facebook is the secret to online advertising success.