On today’s episode, we are going to talk about something that I didn’t know a lot about until just this past week and that’s the Facebook pixel and how to set up a campaign with Facebook. We’ll talk all about that right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode No. 480. Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and we are here today. We’re going to talk about how to generate some more sales or just get more traffic to your website with Facebook. And we’ll talk about that in just a couple of minutes. I have a few announcements and a plug in to share. The first announcement that I want to share with you today is Word Press 5.4 Beta 2 is now out. And the software is going to be released and the tentative date is March 31, 2020 so about six weeks from now.

And they’re trying to figure out how to get full site editing with blocks. That’s the primary goal for 2020. And so, this first release is working on getting some of the project in that way. So, some of the things that have been added are new blocks for social links and buttons. There are more color options for button color groups and column blocks. There is a welcome guide module so you can just kind of understand and figure out how the block editor works better. And there are tools for adding future images to the latest post block. There’s easier navigation in the block breadcrumbs. And then, some additional changes that they made are on mobile, the tool bar stays on top so you don’t lose it, the easier image sizing in the gallery block, several new APIs, friendlier offline messages, table block captions.

And now, you can color just parts of any text in the rich text block. And there have been some accessibility improvements as well. There is easier multiblock selection. There is support for changing an image metatag and whatnot, easier tabbing, and visual switches between edit and navigation modes to work with screen readers and allow those audible announcements to work properly. So, that’s what’s happening. There are more things to consider. Site Health is a project that’s powering 34% of the websites. It’s focusing on the security and figuring out how they can get more secure information to customers and folks that are using Word Press. And there are always more accessibility improvements and a ton of developer changes as well.

And so, if you’re interested in finding out what’s new in the latest, greatest world of Word Press, I recommend checking out Word Press 5.4 Beta 2 and do not run this on a live site but do this in a local environment or someplace where you can spend a little bit of time troubleshooting and making sure everything works. Another announcement that I didn’t announce last week, it looks like it came out about the time the podcast came out but Word Camp Asia is canceled due to the coronavirus that is happening in China right now. And so, it was a big decision and I don’t – it was a hard one to make for the lead organizers because of all of the work and effort and energy and all of the volunteer hours and all of the time that was put together to put this event together and just to cancel it just a week or so before the event.

That’s heartbreaking but I think it’s the right decision with just all of the uncertainty about the virus and whatnot. And so, Word Camp Asia is canceled. And I do think that they will do that again – they’ll reschedule it. It might not be until next year but they’ll have to go through and redo a bunch of work that they already had done. So, that is the sad news from Word Camp Asia. And the last announcement that I have for you today is from WooCommerce. And it's how to grow your business with CBD, your CBD business with WooCommerce. Basically, CBD is one of those things that’s a very new thing that people are trying to sell, CBD oil and whatnot, online. And not a lot of payment processors are actually willing to take that risk to sell those types of products through their payment gateways.

But we’ve worked with them, and I say we as in WooCommerce, but have partnered with the industry leader Square allowing you to send and use your store for connecting with Jet Pack and WooCommerce Shipping and WooCommerce Tax and using Square as a checkout processor. And you can ship labels and do all that kind of stuff with WooCommerce shipping. And so, there is a whole page I linked in the show notes where you can read about that if you do have a CBD store and you’re interested in finding out more about the requirements for that. So, that is the last announcement of the day. I do have a plug in that I found. It doesn’t have a lot of active installs but it is a cool plug in. It’s one by organic themes. And it’s called Bulk Block Converter. And it is a plug in that scans all of your posts and pages for classic content and provides options for individually or bulk convert all of the content within the classic blocks to individual blocks.

It’s an extremely useful tool when migrating the site from Word Press Classic Editor to the new Word Press Gutenberg Editor. And so, it’s a cool thing. And I haven’t tried this yet. I’m going to do this on www.yourwebsiteengineer.com on my test site to see what that looks like because I’m one of those people that now the block editor has been out for a year plus and I want all of my old posts to have the blocks as well just because those reusable blocks that we talked about in the past, it would just be really nice to have all of my posts kind of working in the same manner. And so, I’m going to try this one out and see how it works and I’ll report back if it’s an actual useful plug in and it can convert the changes and just make all of my old posts all set up for the new Gutenberg editor. So, that is the plug in of the week.

Moving right along to the main topic of the show, I have to say that I’m not going to be an expert on this topic. I just want to shed a little bit of light about Facebook tracking and pixels and all this kind of stuff. I’m sure that we’ve all experienced this before. You go to a website and you’re looking for something, you’re looking for some sort of product. And then, all of a sudden, you’re back on Facebook. And then, you start seeing that product show up. The most recent example is we were looking for a mattress for my son. And my wife sent me a couple of messages like look at this link, look at this link, look at this link. And now, all of a sudden, all of my news feed in Facebook, all of the ads are for mattresses from companies I’ve never even checked out before. But that’s the power of Facebook.

And it’s one of those things that I don’t know if I 100% agree with it but it’s one of those things that you know it works. If you’re interested in just learning all of these pieces, I guess, let’s back up and talk about the story here. My wife has this website. I’ve talked about it before, www.fxmedce.com . And she’s doing an online conference next weekend. It’s all about teaching people about functional medicine and they get CE credit for it. And it’s registered with the Board of Pharmacy or whatever so that they’re continuing education. They get credit for that. They need X amount of credits every five years. And so, the goal is to create these online things and allow our customers to come view it live, get their CE credit, or they can watch a replay version and then, we sell the replays.

But we’re getting up to close to the time and it’s like well, we should hire somebody that knows something about Facebook and to have Facebook ads and whatnot so that we can get more eyes on the conference. We only have so big of a reach in. Obviously, my connections, all of my web developers and my Twitter and all of those people aren’t really interested in functional medicine CE training. So, we partnered up with somebody and he’s just been teaching us lot of information about Facebook pixel, how it works, and some of the events and things that we’re looking for and trying to track. And so, let’s go ahead and talk about some of those today. Basically, what needs to happen is on your website, you need to have a Facebook pixel and we’ll talk about that in just a second. And then, the Facebook pixel is the one that does all of the magic. Really, that’s really what it comes down to.

But Facebook pixel is probably one of the most useful tools you can – there is probably a Google Analytics plug in or a Google Analytics pixel. There are a few different pixels. But, basically, it’s a one by one pixel that shows up on your website at different points. And then, Facebook knows what’s happening. It allows you to track your website visitors, whether it’s on your blog or landing pages or your product pages. It, basically, is just a line of code that you can add to your website and it can retarget people as well to track conversions through ads that run on your platform. Now, I ended up using a plug in from weDevs and it is called Conversion Data Tracking. And I was able to go to Facebook and set up a pixel and was able to create this pixel on my wife’s Facebook account. This is on her profile page or her profile page for this conference.

And we were able to go in there and create the pixel. And then, I added that to this plug in, the WooCommerce data conversion tracking plug in. And the reason that we did this is because we want to find out information about people that if they saw the add, did they go to the product page, did they add it to the cart, did they go to the checkout, and was it a success. Those are all of the things that you can track within the Google pixel. And so, it puts a different pixel tracking code on each one of those pages. And so, when we tested it out, there is a browser extension that you can use. And it is called the Facebook pixel helper. So, when you’re on a Facebook pixel helper page, it will, basically, say you are on the product page. And if you go to the cart page, it shows that you went to the add to cart trigger has happened.

And then, when you go to the check out page, it shows that you made it to the check out page. And all of the reason that we’re doing this is so that we can target those people in exact specific spots. And so, within Facebook, if we wanted to say that anybody who went to the cart page, which means they had something in their cart but did not purchase then, show them the ad again or have that pull up on their feed. And whether that be – the cool part about the Facebook tracking and whatnot, it shows up on Instagram and Facebook as well. And then, we’re also running campaigns, which are retargeting campaigns. So, if they’ve clicked on a link or if they watched the video or if they’ve done any of these things, we’re going to retarget them and continue to hit them with the same ad and more information and different ads and whatnot.

And so, it’s really a complex thing and it’s a genius thing when you think about Facebook’s side of things. They’ve created this platform where people spend hundreds of hours a month. And it’s free. You connect with your friends. You see what your friends are doing. But then, all the while, businesses are spending money to get their product and their service or whatever in front of you. And so, it takes a really good person to really know what they’re doing and setting up. And I’m just watching kind of from the back end here. Like I said, we hired this person and we told them we were willing to do $50.00 per day. Well, the least expensive purchase that you can make on the site is like $159.00. And $159.00, $199.00, and $249.00 are the three price points.

And it’s like okay, well, if you spend $50.00 a day and you get one $200.00 sale, if you spend $100.00 a day then, you get two $200.00 sales. And so, it kind of makes sense. I will spend a little bit of money all day long to make more money on a product or a product sale or whatnot. So, that’s kind of what we’ve been exploring and working through. It launched on Monday afternoon. And I’m recording this on Wednesday. And so, it has been going on for two days. We made a couple of sales and we can trigger this and we can track this all through Facebook. And they have a good overall page. And it is the – of course, I just lost it now. It is under if you go to www.business.facebook.com and it’s Ad Manager. And you can go in there and you can see all kinds of information. And so, I’m just looking at this here as I’m recording.

And I can see that we’ve got two ad campaigns set up. There is one for a Facebook, the FX Med conference and then, there is one that is the FX Med Conference retargeting. And so, they’ve got a few different things that are inside of those campaigns. And it is using different criteria for looking at things. And so, in the Ad Sense, we’re looking at website visitors. So, if people went to the website before and then, they’ll see that on Facebook. They’ll see an ad on Facebook. If they have an email address or if they went to some sort of page or landing page, all of this information is being tracked by Facebook. It’s a little bit on the creepy side but it’s really neat where you can target and you can show ads and information to people that are just like you or just like your target audience. So, we have some that have pharmacist as a job title.

We’ve got pharmacist interests and then, interests of other things. We picked out some of the high named people in the functional medicine space. So, it’s like if they are interested in pharmacy or they are a pharmacist and they’re also following some of these other pages of these big functional medicine people then, it shows that they might be interested in our conference. And I can see that. As I’m recording this, we’ve spent $84.00 on ads. And of course, you have to spend money to make money in this game. But we have reached it says 3,500 people and that’s 5,200 expressions or impressions, I guess. So, that is what we’re seeing. And so, 5,200 people have seen this. It’s led to two sales. But you never know. Will people come back? Did they bookmark it? You have no idea.

And it’s really hard to know did those two sales come specifically from Facebook or were they already kind of interested and then, they just happened to see it on Facebook and then, they pulled the trigger. Who knows? You’ll never really know that information. But you can see all of this in the Ad Manager. I have a couple links in the show notes for different places where you can find out some information about setting up the Facebook pixel. Like I said, it’s pretty easy. It’s like the Google Analytics code. You generate the code and then, you use a plug in to put it on your website. And then, the plug in pretty much does everything and Facebook does all that it needs within the tracking code itself. And so, that’s kind of what I want to share with you today. It’s one of those things that it’s a thing that you don’t want to do right away.

One of the first questions that this Facebook person that we worked with said is how are you getting organic sales. How did your first conference go? Because we said that this was the second time around and the second time we did this conference. And he said, “How did the first one go?” And we’re like, “Well, we sold 75 tickets.” And he’s like, “Okay. So, it’s clearly working.” You wouldn’t want to go in and dump a bunch of money to spend for paying a Facebook consultant or someone who is good at running Facebook ads and drop whatever their fee is and then, start spending $500.00 a week or a month or whatever on ads if you don’t know – or if you’ve never gotten any sales. So, I think this is a good way to kind of level up. And we had some income coming in from the conference.

So, we’re like let’s reinvest this and see if we can grow this just a little bit more. And then, the cool part is we’ll be able to sell the replays. And once the conference is over then, we’ll have two replays. We’ll have one from the November conference. We’ll have one from the February conference. And then, there should be two different products that we can continue to run some ads to go directly to those pages and have people purchase on demand content. And so, it’s really interesting. It would be really neat to know as the conference gets closer, does the conversion rate change. Are people like oh, that’s two weeks away, I’m not going to deal with this right now? But as the time comes closer, are they going to be more urgent and then, want to purchase? Another thing kind of along these same lines is the cool part about using these different tools.

So, I’m using Convert Kit. And Convert Kit can tag people when they’ve purchased things. And just having this information, having this knowledge about your customers is really cool because we’ll run a campaign and run an email blast in just a couple of days. It’s one week out. You purchase the first one. Are you interested in the second one? And you can give a discount or you can say within the first three customers, get 25% off type of thing. You can do those types of – I don’t know. We’re just running some experiments. It’s not like this is our full income and we’re betting our livelihood on this. This is one of those things that it’s just really neat to learn. And it’s completely out of the Word Press space.

I know nothing about it. I can add the tracking codes. I can come up with some images for whatnot but I don’t have a lot of – I have no knowledge here. And it’s really kind of neat to see behind the scenes and see what other people see and see this Facebook ads thing and how it’s working. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today. Just a little bit different side of things. And I think it goes completely hand in hand with Word Press. If you want more views to your website or you have a product or you’re launching something, I think it’s worth getting some more eyeballs. Maybe not spend hundreds of dollars doing this but doing some promoted posts or something. I guess that was one of the other things that we learned, too, like a promoted post on Facebook. If you pay to promote it, it doesn’t get the same eyes as if you create an ad campaign itself.

And from the ad campaign, you can target specific people and you get a much better reach than just promoting a post that you already have. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today. A little side thing that’s happening and something that’s kind of interesting. And I’m sure that I’ll pop back in and talk a little bit more about it in a few weeks when we have a little bit more knowledge. But I just thought this was a good way to kind of level up some skills and just learn a little bit about a different but similar platform and something that can help you drive some customers or just some visitors to your Word Press site. That’s what I wanted to share with you this week. Take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye.