Did you ever visit a business website only to find that ads for that business followed you as you browsed other sites and social media platforms?
It’s worth getting acquainted with marketing pixels (also known as tracking pixels) if you’re interested in how that’s accomplished. With the right code, you can improve your digital advertising campaigns, optimize your website, and even increase online conversions.
Marketing pixels – what are they?
Pixels consist of bits of code that let you gather information about website visitors and what actions they took, so you can serve relevant ads to them. Pixels are essential for measuring campaign performance, tracking conversions, and creating audiences automatically based on behavior.
What do pixels look like?
Pixels serve as a small snippet of code that allows a third party to track user behavior.
What types of pixels are most common?
Retargeting pixels
Using retargeting pixels, you can send ads to people who have left your website without completing the action you wanted them to, such as making a purchase. When that sneaker you were eyeing started appearing on social media and websites you were browsing, what did you do? This is retargeting!
Conversion pixels
A conversion pixel tracks sales (or any other metric you define) from your ad campaign, which will help you determine the campaign’s success.
What are the benefits of marketing pixels?
The information collected through conversion and remarketing pixels allows you to better understand visitors to your website and to optimize marketing efforts based on that information. In addition to continuing the conversation through paid advertisements, pixels are also used if a visitor has left your site without completing a desired or expected action, such as making a purchase.
What are the most common ad platforms that use pixels?
A number of platforms use pixels, but at Wet Coast Marketing we prefer AdRoll, Facebook and Google Adwords.
What is the best way to track pixel performance?
You can track and analyze the results of your paid advertisements with ad platforms. You can use these reports to determine how your paid advertisements are performing so that you can see:
1) if you’re targeting the right demographic
2) if you’re allocating the right amount of money to every ad you run.
The dashboard for the ad platform you’re using will show you all purchase data, including post-click and post-view data, for conversion pixels.
The term post-click refers to users who clicked your ad and made a purchase, either in the same session as the click or some time afterward.
A post-view occurs when a user views an ad without clicking, but then makes a purchase afterward.
It’s also important to evaluate the size of your retargeting segments when using your retargeting pixel so you know how many prospects you can reach with retargeting ads to bring them back to your site.
Having learned the importance of pixels, you’re ready to employ them to better understand your website visitors, make smarter choices with your marketing efforts, and increase sales.
Wet Coast Marketing is here to help you install, understand and optimize pixels – get in touch with us to learn more!
