Tracking with Pixels
Demand Side Platform (DSP) Basic Course
Tracking With Pixels
Lesson: Pixel Types
As you just learned, you can retarget your website visitors with programmatic ads. How is this done? Through tracking your website with pixels.
With traditional paid social and paid search, you are issued a single pixel and the platform determines tracking for you. This limits your control and your marketing strategy. With the DSP, you can pixel any and every page on your website. You can even pixel customer engagement within a webpage. With DSP, you have complete control of tracking and using your website data.
Your pixels are organized according to your brands. When you signed up for Well Planned Advertiser, you were prompted to add your first brand, this is the website you will be marketing. At any point, you can add additional brands as needed. When you create pixels, you’ll be prompted to associate each one with a brand.
Your first pixel will always be the Site Visit pixel. This is the pixel that is automatically assigned to you when you created your account on Well Planned Advertiser. This is your master pixel that tracks all visitors. In the next lesson, you’ll learn how to install and later in the course, you will learn how important this site visit pixel is in creating audiences and saving on your ad campaign budget.
Beyond the site visit pixel, you’ll want to develop a pixel strategy. A pixel strategy is the bedrock of successfully using programmatic ads to nurture warm leads. This starts by asking what data you need to track in order to retarget effectively. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
Pixel Best Practices
When developing your pixel strategy, it’s important to remember to pixel key pages. This allows maximum tracking data that ensures you make the best decisions on ad spend.
Products
If you have a best-selling product, you will want to specifically track the product page with its own pixel.
If you have fewer than a dozen products and they are uniquely different from each other, we suggest pixeling them individually. Otherwise, it's best to pixel your products according to category.
Category Pages
Developing your category strategy will be based on your sales goals. If you have top performing categories, pixel each.
You can also group multiple categories together or, with enough products in a specific category, you might even go one step further and pixel a sub-category.
Services
Depending on your service type, you can either pixel each service page individually or use the same pixel for all services.
For example, online courses over multiple topics or grade levels should have a pixel per topic or grade level. For websites that offer the same service with different levels, a single pixel will do.
Lead Magnets
A staple in marketing online, adding a pixel to your lead magnets is a great way to view results and compare ROAS.
Because lead magnets are available in multiple areas of your website, from pop-ups to navigation links, your choice to create a single pixel or multiple will depend on your overall marketing goal.
Social Media
When running social media ads, you can judge the effectiveness of the ads by adding a pixel to the ad URL.
Best of all, you can go beyond the social media ad click by retargeting visitors through programmatic ads. This will give you a true ROAS!
Google Search Ads
Because programmatic ads have an extended reach beyond Google Display Network, we recommend using only Google Search Ads.
By adding a pixel to your Google Search Ad URL, similar to social media ads, you can retarget and get the best ROAS.
