How to Add the Facebook Pixel to Your Shopify Store

Adding a Facebook Pixel is the ultimate marketing weapon for Shopify store users. You get the power to retarget customers, create super-segmented ad sets, and remind your store visitors to finish checking out. 

It’s estimated people around the globe are now being flooded with 20,000 marketing messages every day, and more than 3 million companies now using Facebook for advertising. 

To stand out, your Shopify store has to get creative.

Dive in to learn:

• Why you need to be using the Facebook Pixel 
• How to install it to your Shopify store
• Two killer hacks to get more conversions

Installing the Facebook Pixel into a Shopify store is hands down the best (and easiest) way for store owners to retarget visitors on social media.

Because the Pixel gives you a way to target visitors in such a specific way, a lot of Shopify owners enjoy a nice ROI on their retargeting ads. But only if they’ve been set up correctly.

Marketing firm Webrunner proved this with their recent Facebook campaign for eCommerce store, MyFix Cycles.

Using a Facebook Pixel implemented on the MyFix Cycles store, the marketing company were able to create:

• Facebook Ads that retargeted visitors at multiple touchpoints
• MyFix Cycles Custom Audiences that included cart abandoners in the last 14 days
• A Dynamic Ad catalog that pushed the store’s free shipping bonus

The reason the campaign was so successful was because the marketing company targeted visitors who were drawn in from MyFix’s PPC campaign.

Why? Well, the visitor had already shown the intent to purchase a bike. But they might have just needed an extra push.

The result of the campaign? Mega.

The campaigns gave MyFix Cycles an ROI of 1,529% on their ad spend, which is a little over $15 in from every $1 spent on advertising.

That’s why having the Facebook Pixel installed on your Shopify store isn’t only important⁠—it’s essential. So let’s dive in.

Now we know why you need the Facebook Pixel to boost your Shopify store—let’s install it.

Each Pixel has its own unique 15 digit ID, which you’ll install on every page you want to track on your site. To create the Pixel and its unique ID, open up your Facebook Business manager and select ‘Pixels’ under ‘Measure and Report’ in your menu options.

You’ll then see the following screen. Click ‘Create a Pixel.’

Next, it’s time to give your Pixel a name. This is super handy if you’ve got a couple of Shopify stores open, as all of your pixels will show up under the same dashboard in Facebook Business Manager.

We’re calling ours ChipBot Shopify Store (obviously!).

Once you’ve entered your Pixel’s name, click ‘Create.’

Next, you’ll be given an option to integrate the Pixel into your store now or later, so click “Set up the Pixel Now,” and as Shopify is a Facebook Partner Platform, select the top option.

Find Shopify on the list of options on the Partner Platform, and you’ll then be taken to a screen that looks like this:

Once you get to this step, it’s easier if you have your Shopify store’s dashboard open on another tab in your computer. Open up the preferences tab in your Shopify store and scroll down until you see a section that says Facebook Pixel.

Just copy and paste the Facebook Pixel ID over into your Shopify store:

The last step of the installation is to test your Facebook Pixel (to make sure it’s working).

As you’re installing the Pixel on a Shopify store, testing it to make sure it works is painless. Just plug in your Shopify store’s URL, and press ‘Send Test Traffic.’

You’ll then be redirected to the homepage of your Shopify store. Click back into the Facebook Business manager to confirm that the Pixel is working correctly. You should see a screen like this:

Then, hit continue! Your Shopify store is now Pixeled, congratulations!

There are nine core ways your Facebook Pixel will track and monitor your store’s visitors. But some can help you increase conversions and revenue more than others.

We are going to focus on two ways the Pixel can boost sales: custom messaging for people who’ve visited your store and setting up abandoned cart reminders.

Did you know about 88% of buyers have ditched their cart before making a purchase? Never fear. Using effective retargeting can bring back a big chunk of lost customers.  

And one of the best ways of targeting customers and reminding them to finish their cart is by using Dynamic Product Ads. For Shopify store owners, Dynamic Product Ads have become a new go-to technique to boost conversion rates.

To get started, open up your Business Manager and select “Catalogs” under “Data Sources” and create a new catalog.

Once you’ve created your product catalog, you’ll now need to add a product feed, so that your catalog can automatically generate your product listings. You can create multiple product feeds for your store to represent different categories, so users aren’t offered products that cater to specific demographics.

As a Shopify store owner, setting up a product feed is super easy and requires no code. All you need to do is add the Facebook Product Feed app from the Shopify App Store, and your product feeds will be created automatically.

Once you’ve installed the app, go back to your Facebook Business Manager, select “Product Catalogs” and click “Add Product Feed.”

Now, all you need to do is copy and paste your unique Flexify product URL feed and click “Upload.”  (Hint: your unique URL will look something like this- http://your-store-name-here.myshopify.com/a/feed/facebook.rss)

Pro-tip: If you don’t want to use the Flexify app, that’s cool. But you’ll need to build a Data Feed manually. It can be CSV, TSV, RSS XML, or ATOM XML format, and it needs to follow a strict set of rules. However, building your own product feed can be useful if you’re looking to add more custom retargeting to your ads such as time-sensitive discount offers. Once you create your Data Feed, make sure you store it in Google Drive or DropBox so Facebook can always access it through the cloud.

The last part of setting up a Dynamic Product Ad is to build the ad itself.

Open up Ads Manager and click “Create Campaign,” and under campaign objective, select “Catalog Sales.”

Under each Ad Set, make sure you set up custom names, so it’s easier to track the success of each ad set. For example, if you’re selling watches, label the ad sets “women’s watches” and “men’s watches,” so you’re able to track your conversions better.

Next, make sure you’re only targeting recent website visitors who have left their cart. You can customize this, so if you only want to show an abandoned cart for 2 days, you can.

Then, set your audience. It’s here that the Facebook Pixel comes into play. The Pixel has already created the custom audience for you, so just select the Pixel from the dropdown menu options.

Here’s the annoying part: building your ad sets can be time-consuming and tedious. But where there’s good news as well: Dynamic Ads are different than standard Facebook ads. Instead of having to write all of the copy, Facebook pulls copy from your product feed. So a lot of the process is automatic.

Here’s a Facebook Template that shows how your Dynamic Product ads will look. Keywords like “product.name” will help Facebook to pull data from your product feed when the ad is shown to your customer.

To set this up, just add in the automatic feeds in your product ads:

Click create, and you’re ready to retarget!

Pro-tip: Once your Dynamic Ad sets are created, it’s time to really use them to boost your revenue. One of the best ways to do this is to offer a time-sensitive discount code on your ads.

Set this up in 4 steps:

1. In Facebook Business Manager, click ad sets and select the toggle in the offers section to turn on offers.
2. Choose your Facebook page that will show your offer (your Shopify store) and then select Create Offer.
3. Next, add in details about your offer (for example 10% off – limited time only) and then click create.
4. Finally, at the ad level, select an image for the card you want the offer to appear on. The image appears at the beginning of the carousel in your dynamic ad and directly in the offer like so:

The best part about having a Facebook Pixel installed on your Shopify site is the amount of data it gives you on your store visitors.

Using it, you’ll be able to find out things like who has visited your store before, and shoppers who are abandoning their carts. And this is why creating audience segments to target each set of visitors is super important.

You can segment your audiences into groups that look like:

• Existing customers
• People who abandoned cart
• Your email list
• Website visitors who didn’t convert

But to get the most out of your Facebook Pixel, we recommend going even more in-depth and segmenting your visitor’s buying intent when they visit your store. Think about how a customer came to land on your store’s site, and how far down their buying journey they are.

A quick brainstorm should come up with something like this:

To make full use of our Facebook Pixel, let’s segment and target visitor #3, who found our site on Social and looked through our range of Women’s Jackets. Now, we’re going to be doing some in-depth targeting here, so let’s move over to Facebook Analytics.

Click on your Facebook Pixel and then select “Create Custom Audience” here:

Next, we’re going to create a super segmented audience to target our buyer persona from earlier on.

To do this, we need to our conditions to target “Social Networks,” exclude “New Web Users” and target those visitors who are using visiting a particular page. For us, it’s “Women’s Jackets,” so we just need to add in the URL to that page from our Shopify store.

Once you’ve created these hyper-targeted audiences, you’ll see them when you set up a new Dynamic or Single Ad campaign using Facebook Business Manager.

Shopify world domination? We think so.

Okay, having the Facebook Pixel installed on your Shopify store is hands down one of the most profitable ways to scale your business. But you need to go beyond the bare basics of the Pixel to get the most out of it.

Setting up the Pixel and tracking your visitors is a great first step, but creating and deploying dynamic ad sets, taking a deep dive into your visitor’s buying intent, and setting up touchpoints on your Shopify store are all game-changing tactics.

Retargeting is starting to saturate the market, so you need to niche down and target your visitors with products that they’ve shown interest in. Adding retargeting into your marketing arsenal is a killer way to drive otherwise lost revenue back into your store. But you need to get creative, so you don’t blend into the rest of the 20,000 marketing messages your store visitors are seeing every day.

Want to know more about custom targeting? Check out our…