If you are buying traffic, and never heard of "pixel tags", you should really keep reading...

What are pixel tags?

Before to explain exactly what is a "pixel tag" in the advertising world, let me explain why it has been created. The goal of any advertiser is to find traffic that is working good for his site or product. Usually, it means generate sales. It could also be free signups, grabbing emails, download a software, etc...

Whatever your goal is, the idea is always the same. Convert traffic, and generate the best ROI possible.

When creating campaigns, it is sometimes difficult to analyze what countries, keywords, traffic sources.... work or don't work. The main reason is that it can be difficult to connect the campaigns or traffic sources, with the actual actions. (or sales)

This is where the pixel tag enter in the game. Advertising companies, such as Google AdWords are providing a small HTML code, that you have to place on your site. This HTML code will actually display nothing. Hence the name "pixel tag", as these codes were originally showing an invisible 1x1px transparent image. Nowadays, it's not even showing that.

Thanks to this invisible tag, the ad network will be able to connect an action to a specific user, which means it will be able to calculate the conversions per campaign, country, site, traffic source, date, keyword... virtually anything. The reports that you will get are extremely useful since they will tell you what is good and bad for your product.

The optimization part

Once you have enough traffic history, you just have to check what is not converting for you, and exclude it from your campaigns. On the opposite, you might want to raise your bids on what does convert for you.

This is actually very simple to setup and will help you considerably to create successful campaigns.

ExoClick pixel tag

Obviously, I wouldn't talk about the benefits of pixel tags if ExoClick was not offering this feature. It is available to everybody from the admin panel and we called it "Goals". It allows you to create one pixel tag (as in one unique HTML code) per goal, or action.

Goals could be for example:
- Step 1, free signup.
- Step 2, payment page.
- Step 3, post-payment page.

Once you placed those tags on your pages, you will get detailed reports from ExoClick Admin Panel. With conversions per campaign, country, date and traffic source.

What about affiliation programs?

If you don't own the product that you promote, for example if you are an affiliate. You obviously can't modify the pages to add these tags.

However, this process is becoming really standard, and major affiliation programs allow their affiliates to configure pixel tags. Contact your affiliate manager and ask him about it.

How does it work technically?

Very simply. When a surfer is clicking on an ad, a cookie is placed on his computer. Then if he browses the site and load a page which has a pixel tag, the cookie will be detected and user data can be tracked. Which campaign, country, etc... This action is saved and statistics can be generated!

Thanks to the cookies, it's even possible to detect an action which occur several days (or weeks) after the actual click on the ad.

For example, a user clicking the ad, visiting the site, but coming back only 2 weeks later to buy a flight ticket.

In short...

If you are buying traffic, you can't ignore this feature. It is a wonderful tool to be succesful with your ad purchases and it's free!