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Additional Facebook Pixel As a Data Source
Additional Facebook Pixel As a Data Source

Learn how to use two Facebook Pixels on your site: One for regular ad management, the other for as a source for segment based audiences

Lari Lehtonen avatar
Written by Lari Lehtonen
Updated over a week ago

This is a specific guide how to use two Facebook pixels on your site in parallel in order to leverage Nosto segments for audience management. In order to fully understand the Facebook Pixel, pixel management and how pixel events create segment based custom audiences, refer to the main Facebook Pixel guide.

We acknowledge that most of e-commerce businesses and therefore Nosto's clients already have Facebook pixel on their website, and the primary motivation to use Nosto for pixel management might be to get access to segment based custom audiences. In case the existing pixel is already working well, has a special configuration that Nosto's pixel management doesn't cover, or possibly the pixel managed by a third party, such as an ad agency, application or plug-in, replacing it with Nosto's pixel management might require additional work. To streamline the process, using additional pixel is supported by Facebook and Nosto and simply requires an additional step to use two pixels as a data source on one ad account. The benefit of the setup is that ads can be managed through one ad account alone, which doesn't require changes to your regular ad management processes or workflow.

To explore the setup we use the most common setup where a site already has pixel and pixel management process in place and the main reason to use Nosto is to use segments as custom audiences.

The starting point is one ad account which we will call account A, which has a pixel 1234 on the imaginary target online store and website: mountainfun.com. The Account A and pixel 1234 are the assets that we want to keep intact, but use ad account A for ad management.

The first step in process is to connect mountainfun.com's Nosto account to a new or an idle Facebook ad account, managed by the same Facebook business manager, which is not used actively for running or managing ads, which we will call ad account B, which comes with pixel 7890.

After this step is done and accounts are connected, mountainfun.com has two Facebook pixels, 1234 and 7890, which don't interfere with each other. Nosto handles pixel management for the latter, pixel 7890, at this point connected to ad account B.

The last step is that the Business Manager needs to add the ad account A as an asset for pixel 7890. Once this step is done, the website mountainfun.com has still two pixels: 1234 and 7890. First managed just as before, and the latter by Nosto. Yet, after this point both of the pixels send events to ad account A meaning that Nosto segments are available on A as audiences, generated by the pixel 7890 and events it triggers. In other words, ad account A can now make use of audiences generated by both pixels.

Below required steps illustrated as screenshots. Note that the experience in your Facebook Business Manager might differ from the tutorial.

Find the list of available pixels under Data Sources > Pixels and select Add Assets from top level menu

Find the the right ad account from the list and select 'add'

The dialog should prompt you that asset has been added

The next screenshot is from ad creation wizard, specifically from the view where audience is created based on website activity. Under this view you should now see two pixels that you can use as a data source.

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