At Propellant Media, we believe that we can provide the best solutions to your marketing and advertising needs. We employ many different online tools to help deliver these solutions effectively. One such tool is the tracking pixel.

What Is a Tracking Pixel and Why Use It?

A tracking pixel is a graphic with dimensions of 1 x 1 pixels. This pixel is loaded when a user visits a website or opens an email and is used to track the user’s activities. Tracking pixels are crucial to the success of any online advertising campaign. Once added to your site, these 1 x 1 pixel graphics gather user behavior and collect other insights that allow you to measure the impact and ROI of your ads.

With just a small amount of coding experience, you can add pixels to your website and begin collecting information about your users. Below we have listed the top 11 pixels you should add to your site so that you can begin tracking your user’s activities and behaviors.

Here are the Top 11 Pixels You Should Add to Your Site:

1. Google Analytics Tracking Code

Adding the Google Analytics tracking code to your website gives you the ability to collect important data so that you can make informed business decisions. There are four important metric reports that Google Analytics has to offer: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions.

Each of these four metrics offers solutions to your business needs. Check out these questions that are answered by each metric:

• Audience –> Who is coming to my site? How many people are coming to my site? Which countries do my site visitors live in? Which devices are my visitors using?
• Acquisition –> How do you acquire users? Which channels are users coming from? How many?
• Behavior –> How are users behaving on your site?
• Conversions –> Do users take a desired action on the site?

Use the Google Analytics tracking code to advertise across Google’s platforms and network of sites and measure the performance of your ads.

2. Facebook Custom Audience

Use Facebook’s custom audience pixel to view website traffic from the pixel, track your conversions, optimize your ad spend, and retarget customers who have visited your site. Using the data acquired from Facebook’s Pixel, you can advertise to very targeted groups of people.

You can define Website Custom Audiences based on which pages they did or did not visit, and by when they visited your website. You can choose a timeframe of between 1 and 180 days.

Custom Conversions measure the amount of people who have completed a desired action on the site. A Custom Conversion is created by selecting a completion page on your site and naming the conversion. For example, a completion page may read “Thank you for shopping, your product is on the way.” When a user visits this page, the Custom Conversion tracks this traffic and is able to determine if the user came from one of your ads. You can also choose the conversion type, such as “Purchase” and add a monetary value to become associated with the conversion page. If you are selling an eBook for $10, you may want to add $10 to the Custom Conversion. This way you are able to gather an estimate of how much money you are making versus how much you are spending for advertising this product.

Another feature offered by Facebook’s Pixel is Standard Events. Unlike Custom Conversions, Standard Events do not need to be tied to a URL. Rather, Standard Events is tracked to the page of interest. There are nine types of Standard Events:

3. Propellant Media’s Pixel (Simpli.fi)

Our pixel, referred to as Simpli.fi’s Pixel, allows you to retarget users who have visited your site. Using our Simpli.fi platform, we are able to custom-create various segments for your campaigns. These segments can be based on any number of criteria, including users who visited a specific webpage or completed a conversion action.

We can also create rules to further filter which visitor qualifies in a particular segment. For example, you may only want to retarget users who visit a specific product page on your site. We would add a rule that filtered out all of the other page visits to the segment. This way we can send targeted ads specifically to users who have visited that particular product page.

Our Simpli.fi platform also has a Segments Tab, which displays the last moment at which a user triggered the tag (updated every five minutes) and the count of unique users in the segment over the past 30 days. Moreover, the chart also reveals the number of users who were added and removed from the segment in the past seven days. This allows us to quickly gauge whether the segment is gaining or losing users.

4. Google AdWords

With AdWords conversion tracking, you can see how effectively your ad clicks lead to valuable customer activity. Google AdWords helps bring in new customers by showing your company’s product, service, or brand in front of a customized audience. With graphic display ads, YouTube video ads, text-based search ads, or in-app mobile ads, you have many different ways to target your audience with AdWords. You can customize your campaigns to target only certain countries, regions, or cities – or you can target customers within a set distance from your business or shop. Using the AdWords pixel allows you to understand which campaigns and are working or need to be further optimized.

5. Bing Ads – Universal Event Tracking (UET)

Bing’s Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag tracks what your customers are doing after they click on your ad. This features of this program are very similar to Google’s AdWords tag. However, because so many people have an anti-Bing perspective, the Bing advertising marketplace tends to be less competitive. Moreover, there are people that regularly use Bing who there cannot be reached via Google’s AdWords. As a result, Bing’s advertising platform is definitely worth looking into.

Bing’s Universal Event Tracking tool can help you:

• Improve your investment: Knowing which keywords bring in conversions and which ones don’t gives you the ability to make informed decisions when optimizing your advertising campaigns.
• Remarket: UET tags also serve as remarketing tags, which means you can target people who have already visited your site.
• Expand your audience reach: Bing offers a platform that many advertisers to do not consider due to their loyalty to AdWords advertising.

6. Crazy Egg

By adding Crazy Egg’s pixel to your site, you can take digital snapshots of your webpages and generate easy-to-understand reports that display your visitors click behavior. Understanding visitor flow helps you optimize the layout of your webpages.

7. Call Rail

Call Rail is a call-tracking program that provides marketers with call analytics. Marketers can use Call Rail to measure and improve ROI by discovering which marketing campaigns their users came from (online or offline), keywords they searched for, the ad they saw, the print advertisement they read, the website they came from, and etc. By using Call Rail, you will be able to identify which marketing efforts are effective and which ones are not.

8. LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides a conversion tracking pixel for advertisers. This pixel is useful to use if you choose to advertise on LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn’s ad service allows you to target a unique audience with over 500 million active professionals. You can target them by job title, function, industry, and more. Moreover, LinkedIn’s ad management system allows you to target audiences at different buyer decision funnel points.

With LinkedIn’s pixel, marketers can see how many leads are generated from their ads placed on the platform. You can track how many times members converted after clicking on – or even just viewing – your ads. You can also track and measure the true value you’re getting from your advertising on LinkedIn on desktop and mobile, including return on ad spend, cost per conversion, and conversion rate – all using analytics within LinkedIn’s campaign manager program. With this, you can further optimize your creative, targeting, offers, and more.

9. Jivochat (any chat bot)

Jivochat is a free tool that helps you monitor and talk to your clients on your Website, Facebook, Email, Phone, Telegram, and Viber in real time. Jivochat allows visitors to talk to you from within other popular apps. This means your team can reply from any program they find comfortable. Moreover, if a customer visits your site, you can respond to them quickly – messages are delivered in real-time. This way, your team is always responding as fast as possible to potential leads or current customers.

10. Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a tag management system that allows you to quickly and easily update tags and code snippets used for tracking and analytics on your website or mobile app. This program allows you to manage analytics and advertising tools in your apps without having to rebuild and resubmit the applications’ binaries in the app marketplaces.

Google Tag Manager is a Google product; however, you are not limited to managing only Google tags. The program allows you to manage many different third-party tags, including many of the ones mentioned in this blog post. Moreover, if there’s another tag which doesn’t have a template in Google Tag Manager, you can add your own custom code – making the program flexible for a variety of tags.

11. Twitter Pixel

Twitter’s conversion tracking pixel allows you to track the actions users take after viewing or engaging with your ads on Twitter. Not only can you attribute conversions to the last link click of your Twitter ad, but you can also track all other types of ad engagements like retweets, likes, and impressions. You can also pass transaction values from your website into your Twitter Ads analytics.