Why You Can’t Trust Pixels for Tracking Your Conversions
Using pixel tracking to figure out which of your channels and campaigns drive the most sales is like rowing a canoe with a tennis racket—you’re not going to get anywhere.
We get it, that hurts to hear, but your brand, and your bottom line, will be better for it.
There are three major reasons tracking pixels don’t work: they’re unreliable, their function is too limited, and they’re a waste of valuable company resources to implement. All of that is before we mention accelerating data privacy regulation that’s crippling this technology’s ability to collect and store user information. (That’s a meaty topic for another post.)
For now, here’s what you need to know about pixel tracking.
What Is a Tracking Pixel?
A tracking pixel is a small, transparent image, typically measuring 1x1 pixels, placed on a website or in an email. Marketers use these tracking pixels to collect information about potential customers and collect information about behavior when a user visits a website or is sent an email campaign. This information can be used to measure the effectiveness of an ad or campaign, and to show more targeted and effective ads to increase conversion rates.
Tracking pixels are often used with ad networks, such as Facebook or Google AdWords, to help advertisers understand which ads resonate with their target audience. By placing these pixels on a website or in an email, marketers can track how many people view or click on the ad, how long they spend on the website, and what pages they visit.
This information can then be used to optimize the ad or campaign for better results–whether that’s more email sign-ups, additional clicks on brand articles, or purchases–and to target the right audience with the right message.
A tracking pixel can’t track everything, though, so generally, brands will use different tracking pixels depending on their key business goals. Each pixel tracks a specific behavior so a marketing or business development team can gather data they can use to increase efficiency and improve the bottom line.
That’s the idea, anyway. If they were able to do these things accurately, they’d be an amazing tool–but they don’t.
How Does A Tracking Pixel Work?
When a user visits a website or opens an email that contains a tracking pixel, the pixel "fires" (loads) and sends information back to the business or advertiser. The information sent back from tracking pixels can include the user's IP address, browser type, operating system, and other details about the user's device. The pixel also includes information about the specific page or email that the user is viewing, allowing the business or advertiser to track specific behaviors.
The placement of tracking pixels is critical to their performance. The right place for a tracking pixel depends on what behavior it’s being used to monitor. For example:
A retargeting pixel may be placed on a homepage or a specific product page to register your browsing behavior on a website in order to serve you targeted ads for those products elsewhere.
Conversion pixels are generally added to a thank you / order confirmation page to track sales from a specific ad campaign.
An email tracking pixel monitoring opens and click-throughs will obviously need to be placed within the email.
Why Pixels Don’t Work for Conversion Tracking
Long story short, pixels aren’t reliable—and it doesn't make a difference if you're talking about tracking pixels in emails or conversion pixels.
If they’re not efficiently and accurately monitoring potential customer behavior, they’re not giving you a complete or reliable picture of your conversions. There are three major reasons they don’t work for conversion tracking for the sophisticated DTC business: they’re unreliable, their function is too limited, and they’re a drag on the company to implement.
Reliability
In order for a pixel to fire and send information back to the business, it must be placed on the correct page or in the correct email. For example, a conversion pixel should be placed on the thank you or order confirmation page to track sales from a specific ad campaign. If the conversion pixel is placed on the wrong page, the information sent back will not be accurate.
But even placing them on the correct page is no guarantee. Conversion pixels not placed correctly on the page may not fire at all, resulting in no data being collected from those user visits. Setting them up is rife with human error, and there’s no way to recapture this lost information on your customers once a pixel error is discovered or even corrected.
Load time can also impact pixel accuracy. Even though they’re small images, tracking pixels may not fire properly if the load time is too long—and you can’t always prevent that by controlling their file size.
Yes, file size can affect load times, but so can the server and traffic on the website. Ironically, a surge in interest on your site can hurt your sales by preventing your tracking pixels from firing, leading to a missed opportunity to collect critical information about your customers.
Functionality
Tracking pixels seem like a valuable tool for businesses and advertisers, but their functionality doesn’t match how your customers shop. Marketing pixels fall down if you’re trying to track the customer journey, especially if your product is expensive.
The journey from discovery to conversion is often complicated, with people browsing, leaving, and returning later. Tracking pixels aren't granular enough to track these different interactions and give credit to the marketing campaign that truly drove the final purchase.
Pixels can only track the interactions that occur on the website or email where they are placed. Let's say you have a tracking pixel on an ad and a conversion pixel on your website's thank you page. Your product is expensive—over $250—so the customer clicks on your ad but ultimately bounces from your website because they need to consider this expensive purchase. Later, after they've done research and checked their budget, they return to the website directly and buy your product.
In this situation, the tracking pixel will only track the interactions on the website, not the ad. The ad that introduced this customer to your product will get no credit for its role in the final purchase. If you have a retargeting pixel on a campaign that goes to this person, that pixel may attribute the sale to that campaign rather than the awareness campaign they first saw.
This tracking pixel limitation can lead to incomplete or inaccurate attribution of the sale to the correct marketing campaign. You’re at risk of turning off campaigns that effectively drive sales because your pixels are misattributing the conversions.
Implementation
Tracking pixels also seem simple but are tedious to set up. A company looking to make data-driven decisions about their marketing campaigns probably wants to track multiple customer touch-points, which requires adding tracking pixel code to every critical page of the website.
All that time spent adding the JavaScript for marketing pixels into the HTML code of every page is time that could have been spent on more critical tasks, especially for higher-paid technical staff members. Furthermore, having a person add the HTML code manually introduces the possibility of human error, which can lead to inaccurate tracking and data collection.
Most critically, though, pixels require a 4-6 week “training window” during which they only gather information about your business and potential customers’ behaviors. That’s a month or more in which you’re not getting insights about whether your campaigns are effective, potentially draining key budget dollars on ineffective campaigns.
They Can Actually Hurt Conversions
Sorry, but it gets worse from here. Yes, using tracking pixels can actually hurt your conversions.
Adding tracker pixels can slow down your website, increasing the chances that potential customers bounce. Even milliseconds are critical for website performance; a 100-millisecond delay in load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. A two-second delay in load time can increase bounce rates by 103%.
If your website is slow, your potential customers won’t stick around to engage with your content or make a purchase, even if your product could perfectly fit their needs.
A slower website also has downstream effects that can lead to fewer people finding your business. Google uses website speed as a ranking factor, so your website is less likely to show up at the top of search results if it's slow.
People don’t scroll very far down Google’s search results page; in fact, the #1 position is worth as much as spots 2, 3, 4, and 5 combined. The result is grim: if your website slows down, your Google rank drops, decreasing your organic views, click-throughs, and conversions. Even a one-spot drop is enough to cripple your marketing efforts.
What About Facebook Pixels?
Facebook pixels or Meta pixels, like other tracking pixels, cannot provide accurate data for a business. These platform-specific pixels have the same limitations as tracker pixels used on websites, in emails, or on ads, including:
An inability to track users who block cookies or use ad blockers
Implementation and placement errors
The Solution
Why not use Google Analytics instead of relying on tracker pixels? A couple of reasons:
Accuracy: The free version of Google Analytics only samples your traffic, so you cannot account for all leads and potential conversions. Google also has an incentive to over-attribute conversions to Google Ads and doesn’t account for impressions that happen on other platforms.
Expense: If you don’t want sampled data, you’ll need a paid version of Google Analytics. That’ll knock a clean $150,000 off your runway per year.
Speed and Ease: To track accurately, you must set up and correctly configure your sales dashboards. This takes time and experience.
We intentionally designed the Prescient dashboard to clear these hurdles. We consider accuracy a must-have and never sample your data. We’re also independent, which means we don’t care if Facebook performs better for you than AdWords. We just want to be right.
We also know your time is better spent actioning on data than sifting through it or setting up dashboards. That’s why we made sure you could set up your account and add all of your campaign sources with a couple of clicks of a button. We also aggregate all your data sources in one place, so you don't have to hop from one platform to the next to check on your marketing campaign performance.
Simply put, Prescient is the best solution for accurately, quickly, and affordably tracking which of your marketing campaigns is driving the most conversions.
Tracking Pixel FAQs
Are tracking pixels visible to my customers?
No, your tracking pixels cannot be viewed by a potential customer looking at your ad, opening your email, or browsing your site. Since a tracking pixel is a transparent gif file, it's right in front of the user but unidentifiable. A code-savvy customer could theoretically inspect your digital ad or email and find the HTML code belonging to your marketing pixel. That being said, tracking pixels are common knowledge, and consumers who are concerned about technology that collects data will simply install browser extensions that block your tracking pixel from seeing and capturing their user behavior.
What is the difference between a tracking pixel and a cookie?
Cookies are small pieces of data generated by a website's server when a user is browsing. They are stored on the user's computer or device by their web browser, with the possibility of multiple cookies being added to a device during one browsing session. A tracking pixel image "fires" when it loads in an email or a user's browser instead of putting data on a user's computer.
Functionally, the biggest difference between a tracking pixel and a cookie is that we're actively getting rid of cookies due to concerns about personal data storage and use but tracking pixels work—for now. There are already browser and email settings that can block conversion pixels from gathering the information they're designed to measure and new regulation that cripples how these pixels can collect personal data.
How do you do conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking is a challenging task that truly requires a data scientist, which is why there are platforms to do this for you. Prescient is an unbiased platform for conversion tracking that uses third-party signals, not pixels, to quickly, easily, and accurately tell you how your website users found you, which of your digital ad campaigns is most effective, and whether the Facebook ad conversions Meta is reporting to you are accurate (among other things), so you can maximize your marketing efforts.
Is Facebook pixel better than Google Analytics?
The reporting tools offered when you use a Facebook pixel are no better or worse than those offered through Google. Facebook/Meta has a good reason to over-assign conversion credit to the ad campaigns you run on their platform: You'll likely spend more money there. But the same goes for Google and AdWords and all other advertising platforms. That's why we believe a third-party, unbiased service like Prescient is best for reporting on digital ads and services like Elevar and Popsixle are ideal for server-side tracking.
How do tracking pixels work?
Tracking pixels work by embedding a small, often invisible, image (1x1 pixel) on a webpage or in an email, which sends information back to a server when loaded. This process allows for the collection of data such as user behavior, website visits, and conversion tracking. However, as user data privacy restrictions increase, the effectiveness of tracking pixels is expected to diminish, as stricter regulations and enhanced browser privacy features limit their ability to collect detailed user information.
Are tracking pixels illegal?
Tracking pixels are not inherently illegal; their legality depends on how they are used and whether their use complies with data protection and privacy laws, such as GDPR in Europe or CCPA in California. These laws require transparent disclosure of tracking practices and, in many cases, consent from users before tracking can commence. As regulations become stricter and more widespread, the legal use of tracking pixels requires greater attention to privacy practices and user consent.
