Engaging with users online through digital advertising is often a daunting task, especially in the face of corporate campaigns, which have a large budget and can seem to be dominating the sector. However, arts companies, no matter their size, can still advertise effectively on multiple social media channels and there are several tools to help with this, including Facebook and Twitter pixels and Google Tag Manager.
I discussed pixels briefly before in my google analytics article, but today I’m going to delve into them more, explaining what they are, how they can benefit your business and what part google tag manager plays in all of this.
So, what is a Pixel?
Pixels are commonly used on advertising platforms to help you measure the effectiveness of your online campaigns. They come in the form of a snippet of code which a web developer implements on your website. This code will then allow the advertising platform to track specific user activity in relation to the adverts you have set up, their online activity and the users interests.
Facebook and Twitter have custom audience pixels for analysing and then targeting your website visitors on their platforms. For example, if a potential customer is interested in going to see a theatre show and visits that theatre company’s website, the implemented pixel will gather information on them and then, if the visitor is a user of the social media in question, will start to advertise the theatre or show to the visitor on their Facebook/Twitter account. The result being, that this individual who has already shown an interest in the theatre, will receive prompting to book, so if they didn’t book on their first visit to the website, they will be more likely to do so later.
Additionally, the pixels can track customer journeys on each website, showing who has booked tickets, who has got to the homepage and left, or who has almost booked tickets. This enables you to make your adverts more specific, targeting the type of people who are most likely to purchase tickets; resulting in a good conversion rate to budget use for you.
How to use Pixels with Google Tag Manager
Implementing pixels can be a frustrating, long process with several bits of code to meticulously add to each page of your website. Also, having to hire a web developer to add this code to your website and sort out any problems which may arise will incur additional expenses and may leave you feeling as if you have limited control over your own site.
However, Google Tag Manger (GTM) can solve many of these problems for you. Once you have set up an account for this tool and it has been added to the header of your website, pixels can be added from the GTM interface. The user friendly, simple and reliable GTM dashboard allows non-developers to add code to website, such as a Facebook pixel, and then monitor updates and installations immediately, without having to get any third parties involved.
This will not only streamline the process of implementing pixels and google analytics, but will also put the power back in your hands, allowing you to run effective advertising campaigns, which will target the most relevant audiences to your show, thus hopefully increasing engagement and ticket sales.
Hope this helped, get in touch with us via social media or email if you’d like to discuss this further.