Internet marketing has a number of advantages compared to traditional marketing, and the ability to accurately track and measure performance is chief among them. Knowing how your marketing and advertising spend is performing, and what advertisements are generating actual leads is crucial to a successful internet marketing campaign.

Facebook remains one of the top destinations for advertising spend from business ranging from Fortune 500 companies down to “mom and pop” retailers. The Facebook advertising platform attracts incredible amounts of ad spend due to its ability to target customers and track performance.

When it comes to tracking the performance of a Facebook advertising campaign, the key is the Facebook pixel.

The pixel is a piece of code that is installed on every page of a marketer’s website. It tracks the activity on a marketer’s website and connects the data to Facebook advertising campaigns.

The Facebook pixel code looks similar to the following:

A second piece of code from Facebook called the conversion event code is used for tracking specific actions such as when a user fills out a contact form or buys a product. This code is strategically placed or installed in specific places on a website that indicate when a specific event has occurred such as a purchase or a lead generation event.

The Facebook event conversion code that should be placed on specific pages indicating a lead conversion has occurred looks as follows:

If you have determined the value of a lead, you can even assign the lead a specific value to be used in the reporting data of your Facebook advertising. Here’s an example conversion event code snippet which relays a value of $10.00 per lead:

Here’s an example: If you have a contact form where users can fill it out to request additional information, this can often be considered a lead generation event. To track this conversion on your Facebook advertising, you would need your lead event conversion code installed in a place that would indicate that somebody has completed this contact form. To accomplish this, a website form will often forward a user to a “thank you” page indicating that the contact form was submitted and processed successfully. On this “thank you” page, a lead event conversion code can be installed to accurately track when the conversion via such a contact form occurs.

Tracking IDX Leads Using Facebook’s Pixel and Conversion Code

IDX integration remains one of the top lead generation devices for real estate websites. While forced IDX registration connected to browsing and searching listings can result in some low quality leads, evidence in recent years shows that it still generates high quality leads as well. Simply put, IDX as a lead generation strategy is a very relevant part of a real estate professional’s online marketing strategy.

But like any strategy, tracking the performance is crucial, especially when actual advertising spend is involved.

It’s important that any Facebook advertising campaign intended to generate leads using IDX pages and IDX forced registration has the correct conversion codes setup in order to accurately track IDX leads. Without this correctly implemented, determining the cost per lead and overall effectiveness of the advertising campaign will be impossible.

Thankfully IDX Broker knows this is important and gives its users an easy way to install the correct conversion codes.

How to Setup The Facebook Pixel and Conversion Codes For IDX Broker

1. First, you need the Facebook pixel installed site-wide. If you’re using a dynamic wrapper for your IDX pages that pulls in the look and feel of your website, then typically the Facebook pixel (located in the header of the website) will also be embedded on all IDX pages (assuming it’s installed on your website). This is a sufficient way to ensure the base pixel code is installed on your IDX pages. Need more help ensuring your pixel is installed? Facebook has some helpful guides.

2. Next, install the lead conversion event code on the IDX Broker thank you page.

The following screenshots from IDX Broker indicate how to find your thank you page when logged into the IDX Broker dashboard.

Then, get your lead event conversion code such as:

…and paste it into the section indicated for conversion tracking codes (see screenshot below):

Once this has been done, Facebook can now track all IDX Broker conversions, and the conversion data will show inside your Facebook advertising reports.