facebook pixel: PageView vs. ViewContent - facebook

Sorry if this has been asked many times but I really got confused on how to use facebook pixel.
I have a landing page (success page) where I want to track how many users have landed to that page.
I am confused between PageView and ViewContent.
In my case, what should I use so I can track the pixel?

#Andrew's answer shows the most useful Facebook page for events.
Watch out because there is another page that shows a similar list of events without even mentioning any parameters. It just says to do fbq('track', 'ViewContent') which is USELESS!
You must do the following to get useful data:
fbq('track', 'ViewContent', { content_name: 'Homepage' });
The PageView event just automatically sends the URL and takes no parameters and is part of the default configuration.
Also be sure to use the 'Test Events' panel to see in real time (instantly!) when your events come through.

The Facebook documentation here explains:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/api-reference#events
In the documentation it says:
The default pixel code fires the PageView event, which can be used to
create Custom Audiences and custom conversions that match referral
URLs. This event should not be removed as it may cause disruption to
the aforementioned rules.
According to FB, the ViewContent event is for:
When a key page is viewed such as a product page, e.g. landing on a
product detail page
Here is an example of the usage of ViewContent
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/api-reference#utilizing_params

Related

Use facebook tracking pixel for registration success that does not redirect to success page

How do I set a facebook pixel event to track registration completion when my registration form completion redirects to my index page not to a registration success page?
Should I use a standard event or a custom event to achieve this, or, do I have to create an intermediate page that the registration form directs to and then redirects to index page?
Fire the Facebook Pixel event when the user clicks on the form submit with 'click' event listener. Standard versus Custom events is a separate issue, but I suggest sticking with Standard events where you can.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/advanced/
Stephen, you provided too few information.
Richy is right that in your case if you can't control where your user lands after submitting the form you should use onClick event to send a pixel event. You can easily validate the form in the code of the onClick event and send it when you're sure data is according to your expectations. You can even do additional requests to your back-end to check the data.
If you can change how your web-site work you can make a landing page where you'd fire an event if all the processing went right.
If you can also easily do it on your index page by loading it with some parameter in the URL that indicates it is visited after the form was submitted. There you can have a simple JS code snipped with condition in it to fire a pixel event if URL parameter is present or do it with Google Tag manager which is even simpler.
There are a couple of good standard events you can use like Subscribe or Submit Application, review them here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/reference#standard-events
You have countless options depending on what level of changes you can do to the site, you coding skills, CMS you use and precision you need.

Is it possible to catch scroll event for an Instant Articles page?

Is it possible to catch scroll event for a page when a user sees a particular content piece?
We need to send analytics requests when user see images on Instant Articles page
You can use FB.Canvas.getPageInfo (more documentation at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.Canvas.getPageInfo/)
I don't think this method allows you to "catch it" per se but there is a way for you to poll it using setInterval which should allow you to detect when the position of the page has changed.

displaying own like count next to like button

I have a website where the URLs have some tracking parameters that do not affect the page that is displayed i.e. the URL is of the form http://mywebsite.com/page1?tracking1=aaa&tracking2=bbb and 'tracking1' and 'tracking2' are just tracking parameters used for some other purpose and do no determine the page that is displayed. The page that is displayed is always 'http://mywebsite.com/page1' irrespective of the values of these tracking parameters.
I have included the facebook like button on my website pages and facebook treats each of these URLs, including the tracking parameters, as separate pages. I'm not able to get facebook to ignore these tracking parameters and just consider the URL without tracking parameters as a page. So, I'm storing my own like count against the actual URL (when I get a callback on the like action) and displaying it next to the like button.
Is displaying own like count next to facebook like button against their usage policy? Is there a better way to do this?
Is there any particular functional reason you're using GET (ie URL) variables to store your tracking?
If you can push them into POST instead, or use cookies or sessions for your tracking, you can simplify your URLs and Facebook should treat it as a single page.
If you have to use GET due to, for example, the links coming from external websites, you could use a pass-through URL to do your tracking, before forwarding to the main page. ie someone clicks the link to redirect?tracking1=aaa&tracking2=bbb&page=page1
And redirect, as you may have guessed, does what you need to do with your tracking before forwarding the user on to page1.

Change transition per submit tag in a form with jQuery Mobile

Is it possible that different submit tags in a form in a web site that's using jQuery Mobile (1.3.1) will trigger different transitions and/or directions?
Just to throw my towel in.
Now for the question you've asked, the answer is a YES. You can use a randomizing sequence to choose the transition at runtime and pass the URL and the transition to changePage, which will redirect you to the url you provided. More at jQM docs
Here's a demo of the randomised transitions : http://jsfiddle.net/hungerpain/fpw6B/
Now for your second question - No, you neednt have an ajax callback for this to work. When changePage is called, this is the operation which happens:
hides the current page
takes the URL you provided through your code
fetches the page through ajax (if the url provided is an external page)
appends it after the current page
shows the new page
As you can see, it doesnt necessarily need ajax.
Hope these answer your questions.

how to customize facebook like button

I am usign the version of based on the <fb:like > tag. This renders a small facbook logo which implements the actual "like" operation, but also includes a large "signup to see what your friends like", or the number of likes when you are logged in, etc. It is pretty clear from what I have read that this is the form facebook wants you to use, but it makes the button to wide for my layout. The point is that I see other versions on websites all over, in particular "the weather channel" has one that includes only the logo with some text such as "like us" next to it. "Chicago Tribune" has one that says "recomend" with a very small like count next to it. I have not been able to determine what these link to or what script they invoke so that I can copy them. Can anyone help ?
when you get the code of the like button from facebook you can play with the options and get different results: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/.
obviously it's limited to how facebook wants it to look like.
it is possible to change the look with css, but that's not wise since it's against their policy and you'd have to keep track with their changes.