On today’s episode, we are going to talk a little bit about Facebook. And, we’re going to talk about how we can target our visitors with the Facebook Pixel, on Your Website Engineer podcast episode number 322.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we’re going to dive into an area and a topic that I’m not really too excited about because I’m not a big fan of, or I don’t know a lot about Facebook. But, I want to talk about it and the importance of it. But first, I do have a couple of announcements that I want to share with you.
A few weeks ago, I talked about the login service Cleft was being shut down. It was bought out by a bigger company and they’re kind of shutting down the service. And, so, I have a link in the show notes for an article over at WPlift.com that has six different alternatives for Cleft for two-factor authentication sign on. And, so, there’s just a whole article there. It talks about Google Analyticator. There’s one called Key, there’s one called Unlock Passwordless Authentication. There is Rublon two-factor authentication, Google Authentilicator, and Wordfence Security.

So, those are some that are listed there, and there’s obviously more options than that out there. But, these are some of the kind of fancier two-factor authentication sign on services that are out there. So, if you are interested in looking for a replacement for Cleft, I would recommend reading that article.

Another thing that’s in the news this week, and this was published by WP Tavern, and there is a new Twitter bot that automatically tweets links to track tickets tagged as good first bugs. And so, this is pretty interesting and if you are interested in getting involved in the WordPress space and trying to fix bugs and fix WordPress core, this is a great Twitter account to follow. So, it’s just @goodfirstbugs. So, that’s on Twitter @goodfirstbugs, and it will tweet out there anyone that’s tagged with a good first bug.

So, it’s really pretty cool. It does look like some of the tweets that are coming out also have a patch keyword assigned to it as well. So, even if this tweets out and it says it was a good first bug and there’s a solution, these would be great things to go and look at and just kind of get a look for what the code is doing and how the improvement or the enhancement has been made. And, so, I’m definitely following this Twitter account now, and seeing if there’s any way that I can contribute during the next few months and just keep an eye on good first bugs over there on Twitter.

And then the last thing that I want to talk about – it’s not one of my favorite things to talk about for several reasons. It’s about the Yost SEO plugin. And, first, it’s not my favorite plugin because I think there’s too many bells and whistles, and I just don’t really like the plugins, all their notifications and what not. And, this is part of what I want to share with you today is in Yost SE version 4.5, they put in an ugly, non-dismissible notice for sites running 5.2. This notice encourages users to upgrade to PHP 7, explaining why it’s faster and more secure. It also includes links for getting started and example emails that users can send to their hosting companies to get this updated.

And, it looks like there’s a screenshot in the WP Tavern article, but it’s like five and a half paragraphs, six paragraphs long, and it takes up almost the entire screen if you’re running an old, outdated version of PHP.

So, the stats are really interesting. It says that from December to March, PHP 5.2 was used by Yost SEO users. It decreased from 1.9 to 1.7 percent, and then when they added this big block of text on March 21st, that dropped from 1.7 down to 1.3. So, it’s made a bigger drop in less time. So, it makes sense. It’s a good way to get a notification in front of the eyes of many. I’ve definitely logged into customer sites using Wu Commerce, and they have 13 notices and they’re just all – like, you actually have to start scrolling before you can even see what you want to do on the WordPress page. So, big, non-dismissible notices definitely make a big stand and say, “Hey, this is something that definitely needs to be done.”

So, that is another thing that’s out there, and probably now that Yost has done this, I probably will foresee in the future that more plugins will do this and they’ll put these non-dismissible notices up there to make sure that they update or do something that’s very very important.

Okay, let’s go ahead and move on to the Is There a Plugin for That section. The one that I want to share with you today is written in by a listener of the show. Tony is his name, and he wrote in and let us know that his plugin, WPBugbot is a plugin that you can easily and quickly track down any error messages or issues that may be happening on your website, whether it’s a broken plugin, a broken theme, or some bizarre error messages. The WPBugbot plugin is a great plugin for that. It lets you search the plugin and theme files for keywords from the editor screens, and you can do some really cool things. You can search through specific plugins or do multi-search and search through everything that’s going on on your WordPress site.

So, if you want to get more hands on and see what’s going on inside your WordPress site, I definitely recommend checking out WPBugbot, and you can find that in the WordPress repository, or you can find it in the links for the show notes for episode number 332.

All right, today, I want to talk a little bit about Facebook and Facebook visitors. This month, I’m trying to curate some content and talk specifically about what we can learn from our customers, what we can learn about the people that are coming to our website. And, this doesn’t quite fit into our target area, but I still think it’s important and I want to talk about it a little bit.

I heard an episode of a podcast over at Late Internet Marketing by Mark Mason, and this was his episode number 133, and he talked a little bit about the Facebook Pixel. And, I just got really interested in it even though I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook and I’m not trying to advertise or sell services or generate more money for my website or anything like that. But, I think it’s just kind of valuable information to know, and I thought I could talk about it and spend just a little bit of time talking about it and how we could set it up and what the benefits are of this Facebook Pixel.

So, you’ve probably already experienced this, as long as you are a Facebook user, of course. Have you ever experienced it when you go to a website, maybe you are looking up something? You went to some website, and maybe they have this cool widget that you want to buy. And, this is a great example. In the last few weeks, my daughter, who’s three years old, is to the point now where she’s potty trained at night. And, she has the ability and the freedom to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This is very helpful when we have a newborn in the house and we don’t have to go upstairs and take her to the bathroom and what not.

Well, I wanted to buy a nightlight, and the nightlight that I really wanted was one that I saw on Kickstarter at one time, and it’s called Snap Power. And, it’s basically a really cool outlet cover. It just looks like a normal two-prong outlet cover that you take the old one off and you put the new one on. And, it’s got a little sensor in there, and it has three LEDs that shine down towards the floor. Really super cool. And, I was looking at their website, and I was just really spending a little bit of time there, trying to figure out, “Is it worth it? Do I want to buy more than one? Is one going to be enough?” I opted to just buy one eventually.

But, I looked at it, and then for the next couple of days, when I was looking on different websites, even on Macrumors.com, I was on Facebook, I was on a few different places, everywhere that I seemed to go, and even on the ESPN app, it showed up in advertisement for this. It just showed up there. It was like, everywhere that I went, it was saying, “Hey, you need to come back to Snap Power and buy this thing.”

So, this is what we’re talking about. But, these notifications in these ads will show up on your Facebook timeline in your Facebook feed.

So, if you’re an advertiser on Facebook, you get this little snippet of code called the Facebook Pixel, and you put it on your website. When people visit your site, they’re cookies, and there’s a little bit of information saved in their browser. And, these conversion pixels can be used to, when they go back to Facebook, Facebook, in their advertising, can see, “Oh, hey, this person has been on this particular website. Let’s show them an ad from this particular website.”

So, this Facebook Pixel is pretty amazing. It’s pretty cool what it can do. It’s to the point where it’s almost creepy, but the Facebook Pixel can keep track of actions done within your site. Knowing these things will allow you to understand all kinds of different information about marketing. The cool part about Facebook, too, is you get very specific information about people that are coming to your website that when you’re targeting people on Facebook, you can say, “I want males within the ages of 30 to 33 that live in the state of Ohio.” You can target your ads specifically for them. So, that’s a lot more targeted than just running AdWords on a Google Ad campaign. So, it’s very very powerful of what you can do, and you can really zoom in on that target demographic.

You can run dynamic product ads where you can change the ad placement based on the actual pages they’ve visited on your website. So, if they went to product one or widget one, they’re going to get an ad specifically for widget one or product one. And, it’s really cool. It works across devices, and you can optimize these ads for Facebook because it goes everywhere. It’s really pretty amazing and, like I said, it’s to the point where it seems like it is a little bit on the creepy side, honestly. It’s like, “How did they know? Oh, yeah.”

So, it’s just the way the world works. And, I honestly like this type of advertising better because I’d rather see advertisements for products that I’m actually interested in, versus products that I have no use for. Another scenario that I’ve seen recently is I’ve been really getting into studying and trying to figure out different courses that are out there for learning Java script. This is kind of a side project, a hobby, a passion of mine that I just want to spend more time learning about code and developing code and what not. And, this three-month paternity period that I have off, I don’t have a lot of time, but I’m like, if I could just spend a little bit of time digging into code, how much better of a happiness engineer can I be at automatic?

So, I was researching one day, and then all of the sudden on Facebook it showed up, “This one site has this free Java script boot camp.” So, I click on that, and then I sign up for that, and then all of the sudden I’m now in my Facebook feed seeing this other code school and this other code school and all these things, and it’s super valuable to me because they’re making the advertisements that I’m seeing is stuff that I’m interested in, and I’m actually clicking on them. If it was all about makeup products or sunscreen or different advertisements of that nature, I’d never click on them. So, it really makes sense and it makes a lot of sense specifically for me to see advertisements that will entice me to actually click on them.

So, this sounds super complex and it sounds like it’s a big deal to set up. And, I obviously haven’t done it yet because I don’t have a product to sell. But, I think it’d be really neat to just kind of set it up and see what happens. And, if somebody goes through the process of starting to sign up for an email newsletter and then they don’t actually, I can target and say, “Hey, get this free thing,” and I can retarget with Facebook ads.

So, let’s talk a little bit about how you do this and how you set this up. It’s pretty simple. It sounds like it’s complicated, but it’s not. So, first of all, you just kind of have to think about, “What do you want to track?” You’re trying to track conversions. That’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re trying to track conversions with your Facebook ads. So, most people think of conversions on the business side of things. When somebody converts from a visitor to your website to an actual customer, they’ve purchased something from you. That’s most of the time when they consider themselves, they have converted that person.

But, there are a lot of other important conversions that you may want to track as well, such as somebody signs up for an email newsletter or somebody is browsing the online store, adds something to their cart, and then does nothing with it. Or maybe they opt into your free or trial membership program. Or, maybe after they read your blog post, they click over to check a sales page of your product or service but then don’t do anything else. There are lots of things that you can track on your website with Facebook Pixel that are considered conversions that don’t necessarily have to lead to sales.

So, this will cost a little bit of money to run these ads on Facebook. But, I think it’s definitely something if you want to try to grow your business and your audience and what not, it’s something to check out. So, here are the steps to do it. It’s pretty simple. First, you have to go to Facebook.com/ads/manage, and then you create the Pixel. It’s going to generate some code very much like creating that code that you put for Google Analytics, that you copy and paste that stuff. You basically will copy the ad pixel code to a safe place on your computer and you may use it later depending on which way you set this up.

But, basically, then you add this code via three different methods. There’s a plugin by the WP Beginner folks called Insert Headers and Footers, and this basically is a plugin that adds a little area in your header and a little area in your footer, and so you can pop that code in right in there. There’s another plugin called the Facebook Pixel, and both of the links to these are in the show notes, but that basically will allow you to enter that code or enter your special ID number and it adds that Facebook Pixel to your entire website. Or, of course, you can always add that tracking code directly to your child theme and just have it displayed and working on every single page.

Then what you want to do is you want to create a custom conversion, and this is under tools in Facebook and then select custom conversion. And then from there, you click on the blue create custom conversion button, and then you insert the URL of the page that marks the conversion. And, so, this is usually a thank you page after someone signs up, or the receipt page after somebody buys something. And then, you name the conversion something that makes sense to you. Maybe you’re having people sign up for a webinar. You’d call it “Sign up for webinar, April 17,” or, “Purchase a product from my store.” Then you click the create button, and you’re done. That’s all it does to set up one of these tracking conversions on your website.

Then, it’s a matter of going through Facebook and just trying to figure out how many of these that you want. This tracking Pixel is going to work all the time and you just want to create custom conversions based on these conversions. Then, you connect them to your Facebook ads.

And, so, once you connect them to your ads, you go into your Facebook ads part. It’s basically automatic. You don’t really need to connect it, but you just have to go and you can look at the tracking information on the Facebook side of things. You don’t really have to worry about anything. It just kind of defaults, and there’s not a lot to do. Honestly, this is a very simple and straightforward process. I’m sure that there are plenty of tutorials out there on Facebook on how to do this and how to set this up properly. But, it’s really easy to get that code inserted onto your WordPress site. I guess that’s the main thing that I want to share with you today.

I’m not going to claim to be a Facebook expert at all. I barely know anything about Facebook. But, we want to make sure that that tracking Pixel is on there. And, I recommend even if you’re not using Facebook right now, you can still install this tracking Pixel and just start collecting data. You don’t have to show advertisements and what not, and I’m sure that there’s data that you can pull behind the scenes to get more information about the people that are coming to your website.

So, I’m going to go ahead and try to install this week just to see what happens, and see if I get real interested in trying to – if I wanted to do a webinar and wanted to get a lot of people to come, then I would maybe spend a little bit of money on an ad, run it in people’s timelines. The cool part about what you could do, I could target people that really like WordPress that are fans of WordPress that are solo-preneurs or somebody that works for themselves. You can really target in on the people that you want to see these ads, then you don’t have to spend a lot of money for these ads.

But, just the possibilities are endless. And, what I really wanted to share with you is just let’s get started, and this is one of the big pieces of the puzzle to just start homing in on advertising to people who are already coming to your website. So, that’s all that I really wanted to say to you today.

The other thing that I really wanted to say, kind of the call to action, and I know that I am terrible at this and I haven’t asked for ratings and reviews for the show on iTunes in probably a year or so, so I just thought, “Hey, this may be a good time to remind everybody.” If you enjoy the show, if you spend time listening each week and you just enjoy the WordPress content, please head on over to iTunes. You can get there quickly by going to yourwebsiteengineer.com/iTunes, and that will take you right to the page and you can leave a review, and that just helps the show get more exposure and more people to hear about WordPress and stay on the WordPress bandwagon.

So, that’s all I wanted to share with you today. Facebook Pixel, get that thing installed on your website and start doing some cool things with it, and maybe you can share some information with me on how you’re using the Facebook Pixel. If you’ve got any cool things, tips or tricks, head on over to the show notes for episode number 322, and you can leave those in the comments. And, that’s all I want to share. Until next week, we’ll talk again soon. Take care. Bye bye.