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Facebook's goal is to place your ad in front of users who draw your attention to your call to action. To achieve this goal, they created the Facebook pixel. It's as futuristic as it sounds …

The pixel is a code on your website that tells Facebook whether or not someone made the call to trade on your website. For example, if your call to action is to buy a tea package, the Facebook pixel code on your tea website tells Facebook whether a user has seen your ad and clicked on your website:

• Put the tea in her car
• Bought the tea
• I haven't done either

As a marketer, the pixel is bad. This can help you reach the users who are most likely to take the desired action and increase your ad budget significantly more than was previously possible. For example, if they know that a user has only viewed different tea flavors on another tea company’s website, they can show your user your ad. Pretty cool, isn't it?

But here's the problem. The pixel needs you to improve it a bit. The pixel can be pulled from its * incomprehensible database *, but that doesn't mean that they will pin it down the first time.

This is where the training of your pixel comes into play.

Why do you need to train your pixel?

Facebook's goal is to achieve conversions, and your goal is to help Facebook achieve conversions. When you train your Facebook pixel, you're running a campaign that isn't necessarily optimized to make money. It is optimized to train your pixel.

This is known as the learning phase because, like a year after completing your studies, you put your pixel into the world to learn new things. It will come back with a lot of new knowledge and use its new knowledge to get more conversions.

During this learning phase, your ad set will be seen by various people who are in the target group you have selected. Facebook will monitor who takes action and who doesn't, and then help you create a custom audience based on that original audience.

Start training your pixel:

1. Choose a sub-target such as video views, website clicks (no purchase request), etc.
2. Create ONE ad set with a CTA for the child target
3. Choose your target group
4. Let the ad set run for about 50 conversions, or at least a week
5. Don't change anything once you've published your ad set

It's time to be patient, because as much as you want to optimize your copy or change your goal – you can't. It is like training your dog to lie down while teaching them to "sit" for the first time. You will be very confused, you will not achieve the desired end result and you will have to start again on another day. 🐶

You can close these ads once you’ve reached about 50 conversions or 5 to 7 days.

Congratulations, you've trained your Pixel! While not nearly as cute as sitting your dog when you ask for it, you will get that warm, blurry feeling when you start converting and see real people who want your products and services.

After you've trained your Pixel, you can use it as a custom audience for your future campaigns.

Just a quick note:

If you have a bigger budget, you may be able to get 50 conversions in a few days. Because Facebook uses your budget to show your ad to more people, you can see your ad better in less time. In this case, you can turn this ad set off and run your purchase-optimized ads for this new custom audience.

If you have a smaller budget – no big deal. Just wait 50 conversions or 5-7 days (whichever comes first) and then run your conversion-optimized ads for your new custom audience.

Create a custom audience based on your trained pixel

For example, let’s say your learning ad set had the video goal conversion goal. You could get over 50 people to watch your video and now you can run your real ads on them.

Choosing your audience for these ads allows you to choose custom audiences that weren't available to you before your pixel was trained.

First step: Go to your ad set and click on "Custom Audience".

Step 2: Choose "Video Views".

Step 3: Choose the duration of the video view (you can choose several).

Step 4: Select the video viewers for which you want to display the ad set based on how long you have watched your video

Fifth step: name your custom audience

Now you're promoting a warm audience of people who know Facebook is interested in your product. Instead of asking them to convert when they see your business for the first time, ask them to convert as soon as they have a better chance of getting to know you.

Marketing is like any relationship – you can't just approach someone in the product aisle and ask them to marry you. You have to get to know both of them first. By training your Facebook pixel, you skip the suggested product route and build a relationship first. Ask them to marry you later (also known as buying your products).

So you've trained your pixel and can now optimize your future ads based on everything your pixel now knows. Technology is crazy …

Takeaways

• Training your Facebook pixel creates a custom audience that is most likely to convert for your future offerings
• Train your pixel with a low-tier ask goal such as video views or reading a blog post on your website
• Do not change your ad set for a week or at least 50 conversions
• Create a custom audience based on the conversions