The Meta Pixel, Google Tag, LinkedIn Insight Tag, Twitter Pixel and others - what they are, why you need them, and why they're not the invasion of privacy you may have been led to believe.
One of the biggest problems with advertising has always been how to measure effectiveness.
Over the years, all manner of things have been tried, such as direct response coupons and codes ("quote SMILE when ordering") to try and understand how good a job ads do at moving the dial and driving action.
It's always been tough with TV, radio, newspaper, and billboard ads, but then along came the internet and social media, changing the advertising landscape forever.
Suddenly, instead of just the traditional broadcast channels which were always expensive and where ROI measurement needed to be as creative as your ads, we had new tools to reach mass audiences but they came with three other major advantages: lower costs, laser targeting capbilities, and enhanced measurability.
In many ways, digital ads 'democratised' advertising, making it more accessible for a wider range of organisations, especially smaller ones.
Instead of 'spray-and-pray', internet and social media ads allow for much greater precision, and that's partly down to the advent of tracking beacons.
This improved targeting isn't just better for advertisers either, it means audiences are not subjected to ads for things they're just not interested in.
Website tracking code: the Holy Grail of advertising effectiveness
Picture this: you work in air traffic control at a large airport. Amongst other important jobs, you're responsible for making sure that aeroplanes taking-off and landing do so safely, and for ensuring they are not involved in mid-air collisions in UK airspace. You're sat at your terminal high up in the control tower which gives you an unhindered 360° view of your surroundings.
A 737-800 taxis to the runway under your expert supervision. You survey your screens and look out of the window to make a final check: there are no aircraft in the immediate vicinity that could cause a problem, and so you radio the flightcrew with authorisation to take off.
Seconds later, the aeroplane is hurtling down the runway. It hits the required speed, the flaps adjust, up lifts the nose, and it's airborne. You watch as the landing gear retracts whilst it climbs steeply, banking as it changes course to the heading you just radioed to the pilot.
168 passengers and crew are all off safely and en route to Benidorm.
You glance out of the window for a final look before the aircraft is too high and far away for you to see.
OMG, now what? How can you possibly know what's happening, where that aeroplane is in time and space relative to all others in the sky at that exact moment?
The answer: tracking beacons.
They constantly relay information about flight speed, altitude, and direction of travel so that air traffic controllers are able to make critical decisions, including course-corrections, in real time when they cannot physically see aircraft in the skies.
It's the same with your digital ads. You can't physically observe the people who are exposed to them, or watch how they respond. For that, you need things like the Meta Pixel and its equivalents on the other online and social media channels where you run ads.
These are analogous to the tracking beacons in aircraft, providing feedback that allows you to make critical decisions, only, instead of saving lives, these decisions save advertising budget.
Never before have advertisers had the ability to measure the effectiveness of their efforts like this, in real time and at scale.
There was much more guesswork involved before, no room for making changes in response to feedback, and an annoying lead-lag cycle to endure.
For example, let's say you took out a full page advert in a newspaper on Monday, which included a cut-out-and-post discount coupon - not only did you have no idea how many people had bought the newspaper, or seen the ad, you also had no idea when they'd see it (newspapers get passed around, and can lie around unread for days), and then you also had to wait for people to post the coupons in, and for them to then travel around the postal system; it could easily be several weeks before you could make any sense of how well it worked.
In today's digital advertising world, you can see how many people you've reached, how often, how many clicked, waited for the landing page to load, and did or didn't take the action you want them too - and you can see it almost as it happens.
It's all thanks to those tracking beacons installed on your website.
Proper deployment of your Pixel or other tracking code is essential
Imagine if the tracking beacons on aircraft were fitted incorrectly. They could send erroneous signals back which might lead to air traffic controllers making bad decisions with very grave consequences. Worse still, they might send no signals at all, leaving everyone flying blind.
It's the same with search engine and display ads on Google and Bing, and paid social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn and more: if their respective tracking code is incorrectly installed on your website or landing pages, you're going to end up with misleading feedback, if any.
So, what does proper deployment look like?
Firstly, you must ensure that you have a snippet of what we'll call 'base' code on every page of your website.
But then, additionally, you may need additional code snippets on specific pages to measure what's going on there, and/or you may also need to create 'conversion events' in the ad platforms you're using.
For instance, let's say you're running ads on LinkedIn aimed at getting people to sign up to your e-newsletter. You need the LinkedIn Insight Tag installed on every page, but then you also need to be able to record when people have taken action and joined your list. The best way to do this is to display a 'thank you' page at a unique URL, then create a conversion event in LinkedIn Campaign Manager (let's call it 'Newsletter Signup' for ease) which records a conversion every time the thank you page is displayed. Now, every time someone clicks one of your ads and visits your website, LinkedIn will get a signal. And if they sign up to your newsletter and are shown the thank you page, LinkedIn will see that too and record the conversion.
Crucially, this will then also allow LinkedIn to attribute that sign up to your ads.
If your tracking beacons are not set up properly, the attribution is either not possible or hopelessly inaccurate. And that's what makes ad campaigns expensive, because without attribution, conversion optimisation isn't possible.
Optimisation is mission critical to your digital ads, which is what your tracking pixel is really there for
When you run ads online or on social media, you get to choose the audience that you'd like to target based on parameters such as location, age, and sex, plus behaviours and interests.
But no matter how accurate your Ideal Customer Profiles are, and how finely you try to target people, the reality is you will always end up putting ads in front of people that aren't interested.
The job of your tracking beacons is to help narrow the search for you, quickly and at scale, and it works like this:
Let's say you're a charity running ads on Facebook to elicit online donations. 1,000 people see your ads, 15 click on them, 12 of these bother to wait for the page to load, and 1 of these makes a donation. That's 1 in 1,000. Not very many.
With tracking set up properly, and measuring the right conversion events, Facebook can do something you can't - it can look at the characteristics of that needle in a haystack using its machine learning, and identify all the people in your chosen audience on Facebook that exhibit similar chacteristics (things like age, location, interests, and behaviours) and make sure these people are prioritised for seeing your ads.
Now, instead of one in a thousand taking action and donating, it might be 10 in 1,000 or 2 in 100.
This is what we mean by optimisation. It lowers your costs by showing your ads to more of the people most likely to take the action your campaign is optimised for, making your ad campaigns more efficient and effective.
Without tracking beacons installed (properly) both you and the ad platforms you're using are operating largely in the dark.
So, why are so many of us opting-out of cookies these days, and what are the implications for advertisers?
The EU and its annoying meddling are to blame for this thanks to The General Data Protection Regulations (better known as GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive.
Now, in fairness, this tracking capability was being exploited by some, but instead of introducing rules that would prevent that in a targeted way, EU legislators did what they're famous for: they took a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Since then, websites everywhere have been asking visitors to opt-in to marketing and other cookies, and to give explicit consent even for things that comfortably fall in the Legitimate Interest bucket under GDPR.
The result?
Everyone who was previously unaware of, or comfortable with, website cookies suddenly fears and blocks them.
"I don't want companies tracking me on the web just so they can show me their adverts!"
The irony, however, is that they still see ads - loads of them - but now they see ALL THE ADS, including for things they have zero interest in, rather than things that they are or might be interested in.
This does make it harder to measure digital advertising ROI, but not impossible. And it does make optimisation tougher, but, again, not impossible (platforms like Facebook, which derive significant income from advertising, have evolved to try and counter the impacts of people choosing not to opt-in the marketing cookies).
Overall, it's still a lot better than traditional advertising channels when it comes to direct response, activation ads.
Key takeways
If you're using ads online and on social media, you'll improve your chances of success with the use of tracking.
1. Tracking codes like the Meta Pixel are essential for measuring and optimising online ad campaigns. They provide valuable data on ad performance, allowing you to refine targeting and improve ROI.
2. Proper installation of tracking codes is crucial for accurate data collection. Incorrect implementation can lead to misleading insights and hinder optimisation efforts.
3. Tracking codes enable ad platforms to learn and show your ads to the most relevant audiences. This improves efficiency by prioritising users who are more likely to take desired actions.
4. While GDPR and cookie opt-outs pose challenges, tracking and optimisation are still possible. Platforms are adapting to these changes, and targeted advertising remains more effective than traditional methods.
5. Embrace tracking codes to maximise your online advertising success. By understanding and utilising these tools, you can achieve better results and make informed decisions about your campaigns.
Are you currently running ads and not seeing any results or results with an unacceptably high Cost per Action (CPA)? Would you like us to test your set up, see if we can diagnose the problem, and make suggestions for improvement? Drop us a quick email to get started.
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