Jared Laidlaw is a digital marketing consultant and co-founder of Ellaw Digital, a boutique digital marketing agency. Jared helps event companies across the world achieve their attendance and ticket goals using Facebook and Google Advertising so that all the effort and stress put into event planning actually pays off.
You can essentially tell Facebook, “Hey, here are all the people who have registered for my event already — go out and find more of them, please!”
Event planners invest blood, sweat and a lot of tears into producing successful events, yet most are missing one key element to achieving amazing results. This element is being used to sell millions of products and services across the world in other industries, but is often ignored within the event planning community.
The one thing missing? A correctly set up Facebook Pixel on event landing pages and websites.
Facebook Pixel is a small piece of website code that can greatly increase your chances of selling registrations, sponsorships and exhibition space.
You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics, the online tool that collects and tracks website data. The Pixel is Facebook’s version of Google Analytics, and it directly links to the Facebook Ads platform, increasing its power.
The Pixel tracks website visitors and matches them to their Facebook profiles. When these matched visitors use Facebook, Instagram and other Facebook-owned properties, they can be shown relevant ads based on what websites they’ve visited.
What makes the Pixel a must-have for your event website comes down to three important functions: conversion tracking, remarketing and look-alike audiences.
Setting up conversions with the Pixel allows you to signal to Facebook the actions that are important to you and what actions you want people completing on your website. Examples of important actions might be viewing your event page, downloading a sponsorship opportunities PDF or viewing available exhibitor booth spaces.
What’s even better is that you can give your custom conversions a monetary value, which can help Facebook automatically find users who are most likely going to generate further revenue for you when you are advertising with Facebook Ads.
Another key reason for using the Pixel is for the creation of remarketing audiences. You’ve probably spent a great deal of effort getting people to become aware of your event via press releases, social media, email and other advertising methods. So why would you waste all that time and energy to let them visit your site once and then never hear from you again?
The Pixel allows you to “follow” your website visitors around the internet with ads when they leave your site without doing what you want them to do (aka, register for your event). Using the Pixel and remarketing audiences has had profound positive effects in other industries, and event planners should follow suit with this implementation.
The last reason why the Pixel is a must-have for your event website is for creating look-alike audiences. As you probably know, the hardest type of customer to get is a new one. It’s much easier to call or email an attendee who came to one of your previous events, or someone who’s on your email address list already.
This is where the Pixel comes into play, as it allows you to create custom audiences made up of people on Facebook whom you deem important. An example might be those who’ve registered/attended previously. You can utilize the look-alike feature to build an audience of people who have many of the same characteristics of your specific group, then target your outreach to this group.
If you’re wanting to make event promotion and attendance a lot less stressful, learn exactly how to set up up your Facebook Pixel here.
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