What is a Landing Page? (and how to attach a Pixel to it)

0:01 Why a landing page exists

What is a landing page? Like a website that you land on, essentially, but why? You remember I showed this image earlier in the course, where there's an ad that takes you to a landing page with a pixel on it, and then when you click the link, it sends you to Spotify. The reason for the landing page is that it filters out bots, and lets you track who's actually following through to do what you want. If you just send people directly to Spotify, you're not going to get the same level of intentionality, and you're not going to filter out bots, so the pixel on your ad ends up optimizing for the wrong people, and builds a way less valuable audience that's probably full of not even people, bots. There's a ton of bots on the internet. So this landing page is vital, and putting the pixel on it is the only way to actually utilize the value of that landing page, you need these two things.

1:10 What makes a landing page good for conversions

Common landing page services: Linktree, Hypeddit, ToneDen, Feature.fm, SubmitHub, et cetera, there's so many, and to some degree, use whatever you want. But there are certain things that make landing pages good for conversion campaigns, which is what we care about in this course. It needs to load fast, if it doesn't load fast you're going to lose conversions. It has to have pixel and conversion API integration, the pixel we've talked about, conversions API is just another way you add data to your dataset, managed within your pixel dataset in Events Manager the same way you manage the pixel itself, it's a really easy setup, you just create a token and paste it onto the landing page.

You want it to look good, because people are going to go there and see it, it's up to you how much you care about that, but I actually prioritize loading fast over looking good, because this is 2024 and people do not want a webpage to take three seconds to load, they're gone. It has to provide actionable data to you, stuff like how many people are clicking through, what countries they're in, so you can figure out what countries to stop spending ad money on because it's just not working. And it has to be reasonably priced, meaning the landing page service can cost money, but fortunately the one I recommend is free, and it does all of these things, it's called SubmitHub.

2:53 Why SubmitHub is his recommendation

Many of us probably didn't realize SubmitHub actually has a landing page service, but here it is, it's called SubmitHub Links, you get here by going to submithub.com/links. In the sidebar you'll find it in the top bar. This is probably going to be empty, that's fine, you'll need to create an account, you don't have to spend any money. I don't know if this service is always going to be free, I do not have an affiliation with them in any official capacity, I just like them because they've been really nice and have this amazing free service. It provides all the data you need, all the tools you need, it's fast, it looks good, I really can't complain. It also has this amazing Get Help button where you can literally go into a chat and ask questions if you're having trouble, and I find them incredibly helpful.

3:51 Building the landing page

So you're going to say Add a Link, this is where you create your landing page, in this course I'm just going to focus on SubmitHub landing pages because it's so easy and gives you all the core concepts you'll need. You can actually import information from other services, if you've already got a Linktree you can import it in here. We're going to hit Landing Page, give it a title, magic nothing test page, since that's all we're doing. You can give it a description if you want, I'm going to link to my all-time favorite baby playlist, this is really fun, I love this playlist. You can also link to a song, an album, or anything you want that's not music, though that wouldn't be a conversion campaign for your music, there are different reasons to link to different things which we'll talk about in another video.

4:56 Setting up the pixel

You can give it a title and button text, I'm going to do neither, these are optional, there's a lot of options in here, you can add more links to Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, whatever, and you can upload an image, though it automatically imported the image. Then you see pixel, no pixel, include a pixel, include a pixel for sure. So then we go back to our Events Manager and grab our ID, this is how we're going to load the pixel onto the page. Something else you need to know: you need to be using Chrome, maybe Firefox, maybe other browsers work, but Safari is not going to work, they don't support Safari in Meta, there's beef between Apple and Facebook. You also need to turn off any ad blockers, since we're making ads, they'll mess up your ad stuff. And there's a Chrome extension called Meta Pixel Helper that I recommend installing so you can test your pixels and make sure they're properly installed.

To install the pixel on the landing page, we need to grab the ID, you can grab it right here or go to settings, that's my dataset ID, which is the same as my pixel ID, I'm going to bring it back and paste it in. It's going to ask if you want to add a conversions API token, we talked a bit about that earlier, right now we're going to skip it. All you have to do is scroll down to where it says Conversions API, click Generate Access Token, copy it, paste it in, click a little test thing, and you're done. These things do change though, Meta's changing their interface, SubmitHub is changing theirs, so none of this is going to look exactly the same when you're doing it, you've got to use the concepts and do a little exploration, and if you're having trouble, hit that help thing.

7:37 What page view and view content events do

So we pasted our pixel in, and you'll see this custom events section, this is what we were talking about with Meta's pixel events, the whole point of the pixel. We need a way to get information from the landing page back to Meta to help build our audiences, we use events to do that. When someone visits your SubmitHub link, it sends a page view event to Meta, meaning when they load the landing page, the pixel code sends information back saying there was a page view event. And when someone clicks a link, like the link to Spotify, it sends a view content event to Meta, meaning somebody clicked the link, so they can do conversion tracking for your conversion campaigns. This is why I love SubmitHub, they're literally built for this purpose because people are building and promoting playlists on their platform, it's a streamlined, excellent product for this.

I wouldn't recommend giving audio on the landing page, because you don't want people listening there, you want them listening on Spotify. Then I'm going to hit Save, here's my landing page, look at that, it's beautiful, a little fuzzy, but you can make it beautiful. Now we need to test it to make sure it's working properly, so I've got this link, if I click here it takes you to the playlist, amazing. We're going to grab the link to test that our events are working properly, and go into test events on the pixel we've created.

9:41 Testing your pixel before you launch

We haven't set up server events yet, that's where the conversions API token is, and I don't recommend doing it before testing, you might need to remove it, sometimes when the conversions API is set up it doesn't track the website events correctly, this is something I'm confused about honestly, it comes and goes, I think there are just changes happening internally to Meta and SubmitHub where there are code conflicts. So just for testing purposes, set up the pixel and do the website test events. You're going to paste the link and hit Open Website, and if you've installed the Meta Pixel Helper you can look at it, remember, Chrome, no ad blockers. You'll see a page view event was sent to the pixel back to Meta, that's exactly what we want, so we'd expect to see a page view event on our test events in Events Manager, and there it is. And if I click the link, we should see a view content event, because that's what SubmitHub sends when you click the link, and there it is, view content.

11:05 Allow lists, patience, and troubleshooting

There can be some things to know, first, test events appear in real time, but it may take up to 30 minutes after you set up your event to see it in your analytics, so I'm telling you this because sometimes it's not immediate, you might need to give it 30 minutes or a whole day, if it's not showing up just give it a day. You've got to be patient with this stuff, it can be frustrating, and I understand that. The truth is it's just going to take time and effort, you're going to stumble through the setup, and once you get it set up and get the wheels rolling, it's like you've primed the pump, this stuff is awesome and it's worth it, but it is challenging. So be patient with yourself if you're running into problems, it's okay, some of you won't have any problems, this will just work, some of you will.

There's going to be diagnostic and history stuff if there are issues, settings you can use if you're running into problems, like setting up an allow or block list, this is useful if you don't want other people putting your pixel on their stuff, for example you guys could steal this pixel and put it on your own stuff and completely screw mine up, and I don't want to let you do that, so I'm going to create an allow list and choose what domains I'm going to allow to send information back to my pixel. I'll enter submithub.com, that's good enough for now, and this will immediately stop all traffic and event data from all other domains from being included in your ads performance data. So if you create an allow list, it automatically blocks everything else, if you create a block list, it automatically allows everything else. Now I've got my allows, and you can always see them from here.

So that's how you set up your pixel, it's done now. Here's my Meta Pixel Helper, and you can see the events happening, you can troubleshoot from there. Now you're ready for the next step.