All About Tracking Flashcards
What is the Facebook pixel?
A piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns.
The pixel is the “eyes of FB” on your website that let FB know what the people that are coming through the ads are doing. It sends all the information back to FB & that’s how it appears on your dashboard.
How does the FB pixel work?
This is done via a cookie, a piece of code that runs on your browser that stores & sends information every time an event happens. It lets you create custom audiences of people that visit your website or have done a specific action.
A high-quality pixel has good data. FB uses the data on your pixel to optimize your ads meaning that the better data you have in it the better people it will find and the more purchases or leads you will have.
If you have more than one offer, you should have a pixel per offer and not mix them up. The person buying product X is different from the one buying product Y.
On the other hand, the pixel could be used as a reporting tool. Optimization happens on the ad level and the pixel doesn’t hold the importance others defend. Ads performance could be optimized by improving your copy, funnel, ad structure, & audiences using the same pixel.
How to use UTM parameters to match Shopify sales with campaign data from FB?
UTM parameters are a piece of text appended to the end of your website URL.
UTMs add information to the end of your URL. The info is the traffic source the click came from the campaign ID, the ad set ID, and the ad ID.
FB dynamically updates this information for each click with the exact campaign, ad set & ad that led to the click.
Shopify automatically captures these UTM parameters from all the clicks that land on your website and tags them to the user. If the user buys, you can see exactly the campaign, ad set, and ad that drove the customer to your website.
Use Data Studio to match the campaign data from FB with the transaction data from Shopify. This way, you can see the return on ad spend each campaign, ad set & ad is bringing in.
What is the Conversion API & how it works?
An alternative to the standard tracking method: FB Pixel. It makes tracking more consistent and accurate because you are able to track conversions that the FB Pixel could have missed due to browser blocking cookies and other issues.
FB Pixel works by inserting a little piece of code in all of your website pages that tracks the users and their behavior on your website. This is known as 3rd Party Tracking since it is not your own site that is actively tracking the users, but rather an extension of FB that is tracking users through your website.
The Conversion API tracks users from the server side and then sends this data back to FB. Your own website tracks the user, then sends the tracked data back to FB. This is considered 1st Party Tracking because it’s your own server tracking things, rather than a 3rd party.
What is Google Tag Manager?
GTM behaves like a “bucket” that holds all your pixels/tags/events from FB ads, Google ads, Google analytics, Pinterest ads, TikTok ads, etc. all in one place and then injects them onto your pages.
You avoid having to install each one of these tags individually every time you create a new page. After the initial setup is done, you will only have to install the GTM code on your pages, instead of having to install dozens of tags/pixels/events from different services and ad networks each time.
