How To Sell Pixels On A Website

What Are Pixels

A tag also known as a pixel is a short snippet of javascript (code) that does something on your website. In the context of marketing/advertising tags and pixels, they are often collecting some information about the visitor to a website and their behavior on the site. This is then sent back to the respective marketing/advertising platform to be processed and reported.

Facebook Pixel Example

A Facebook pixel is implemented across all pages of a website to collect information about users that came to the site via Facebook. A Facebook tag may be implemented on a “Thank You” page after purchasing a product. When you reach the “Thank You” page, the Facebook tag will execute or Fire and send Facebook information about the products you purchased, the revenue of the transaction, the advertisement/article you came to the shopping site from.

The Facebook tag is what makes analysis and reporting on the user behavior possible.

This is what a tag looks like in the source code of a page (Google Tag Manager in this example from the Tag Inspector site):

How do Marketing and Advertising Tags and Pixels Work?

At a very high level, the process works as follows:

A user looks up a webpage, thus initiating page load.

The browser “reads” the source code of the page, embedded in the source code are the various javascript tags (like the script that you see above).

When the browser “reads” the part of the page where the javascript tag/pixel is, it executes (or “fires”).

A little caveat here is if tags are managed through a Tag Management System or if they are piggybacking off another tag. In which case, the initial tag (or TMS) that is on the page is what is executed. That tag (or Tag Management System) that fired, fires the other tags that are contained within it. We’ll explore this a bit more when discussing Tag Management Systems later in the series.

When a tag is fired, it’s given function is executed.

For most tags, this means that tracking information is sent. The tag will capture information from the user (possible data such as user ID, the source that the user came from, location of the user, etc.), information from the page (if it’s an ecommerce site this would be information like the products being viewed, information about each product like SKU, price, color, etc. or for a content site would be information such as article title, author, etc.), and information from the URL (here is where the campaign information comes in, if using Adobe Analytics it may be the CID value or in Google Analytics it may be utm parameters).

The data grabbed by the tag is then sent to a third party place where it is recorded and processed, leading to the pretty analytics reports and web analytics!

For many tags, the request being sent will be structured as follows: www.thirdpartydomain.com/?a=userinfo1&b=pageinfo2&c=campaigninfo3. The first section (thirdpartydomain.com) shows us where the data is going and the section at the end is the data being collected in the query string. In a future section, we will discuss how to see all of this and troubleshoot tracking.

What Meta Pixels Are From Facebook

The Meta pixel is a piece of code that tracks events on:

• Page views
• Add to cart
• Purchase
• Scroll depth
• Time on page
• and more

Discover different events to track in this pixel events guide from Meta.

The Meta pixel helps you optimize your ads and make sure they’re shown to the right audience. You can also use the pixel to improve your Facebook retargeting and remarket to people who have visited a specific page or taken a desired action on your website. 

In conclusion, the Meta pixel helps you better understand the impact of your ads by understanding what people do after they see them. Thus, you can reach people more likely to take meaningful action, like purchasing a product. 

The Meta pixel works in six steps:

• Install the pixel. Everything starts by adding a snippet of tracking code to your website.
• Collect insights. You’ll begin receiving insights about site visitors, such as where traffic is coming from, what device they’re using, and other demographic information.
• Review behaviors. See how people act on your website, whether they explore a specific product page, or if they put something in their shopping cart.
• Build audiences. Use the data collected from pixel events to create Facebook Custom Audiences, lookalike audiences, and ads tailored to those specific people.
• Optimize bidding. Take advantage of the lowest cost bid strategy to reach people likely to take a desired action—for example, buying a product—to spend your budget efficiently. 
• Analyze events. Assess conversion events to decide the best Facebook ads strategy for your business.

Rent Your Pixel For An Income Stream

Yes you read that right. We came across an amazing platform that no longer exists but still wanted to share the concept. Low key would love someone to revive it back.

What Is Renting Your Pixel

Let’s say one company owns a website that sells wine, and another company owns a website that blogs about wine, under the right circumstances, the company that sells wine would pay really good money to retarget the visitors of that blog! That’s repixeling.

While advertisers are lining up to retarget different websites and seeing an improved return on their ad dollars, the primary benefactor of this kind of strategy has been website owners who are getting paid for their partnership.

The backbone of “repixeling” is Repixel’s marketplace, where people who own websites can post a listing announcing to advertisers that they’re willing to accept “repixel requests”. Site Owners write a short description, they set their price, and then they wait for bites, which they can either approve or deny if they feel the advertiser is too competitive. Here’s a fun & quirky example of repixel at work:

Why Repixel Other Sites?

More Scale

Marketers have enjoyed the benefits of remarketing for over a decade. But scale is limited by the number of visitors reaching your website or app. With thousands more web properties at your fingertips, you’ll have the power of retargeting not just your own website, but as many others as you’d like.

Value in Branding

With CTR’s on Facebook Ads averaging at around 1% is 2017, you need to be sure that the other 99% of your ads are being seen by the right people. Use Repixel to make some noise in the market so when people think about your industry, they think about you.

Higher Lifetime Values

Repixeling doesn’t just lead to cheaper customer acquisition costs…because your new audience is actively in the market for your product or service, low quality “impulse buys” from users will be a thing of the past.

Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

No more branching out into high volume but high CPA placements. With Repixel, you’ll have added reach without compromising on acquisition costs.

Conclusion

There are many ways to sell pixels on a website whether for your own site for retargeting purposes or potentially renting out the pixel to create a new revenue stream. We hope that you enjoyed this article on a fascinating subject we love to share.