“What's your marketing strategy? Is it working? How do you know?”
As a marketer, you're constantly on the lookout for ways to improve your marketing strategy. What could be better than discovering a new tool that helps you get your message across? In this blog post I'm going to introduce you to the Marketing Pixel.
Here, I'll tell you what a Marketing Pixel is and how to use it to create great advertisements that will help grow your business.
Now, because the Marketing Pixel is a bit of a loaded topic (lots of ground to cover), I'm trying to sort out the best way to go about bringing this topic to life, as there is so much to learn about it.
After a bit of brainstorming, what I've decided to do, is to not have this be the only article about this particular subject. Rather, this will serve as more of an introduction for you, so that I can bring you up to speed on this very powerful technology.
Your understanding of the Marketing Pixel, may be just the thing standing between where you are right now, and where you'd like to be in the future, and not just from a financial perspective. You see, while yes, this knowledge can help you earn more, it can do something even better – it can save you lots and lots of time!
What is a Marketing Pixel?
The simplest definition of a Marketing Pixel, is that it is an invisible thing that your website can use to track virtually anything that happens on your website.
These things, or marketing pixels, act like surveillance cameras for your website. So, if I gave you a list of 1000 things that can possibly happen on your website – you'd be able to track all of them with marketing pixels.
I say “invisible”, because from a user's perspective, it might not seem like much happens on their end when the pixel is installed and active. However, behind the scenes is where all of the action takes place.
Although you can use these pixels to keep track of just about anything, there are some types of data that they're best suited for. The first type, is user behavior related data.
So What are These Marketing Pixels Made of?
Well, just as any other code, they are exactly what you'd expect – they're made out of lots of ones and zeros. When a website wants to understand more about its visitors, they will use the data that they gather from these pixels in order to create marketing decisions that improve the user experience.
You see, in statistics there is something called a “binomial distribution.” This basically means that if you were to track the actions of 1000 website visitors, then what you would expect is to see them follow an expected distribution pattern.
For example, even though you might think that the majority of your visitors are using Google Chrome, you might find out that most of them are actually using Safari.
The same goes for almost everything else – how long it takes for people to complete actions on your website, what words they might use in their search queries, and so much more.
What can I do with this Information?
Well, first of all you can learn quite a bit about your audience. This is extremely useful because after you've learned more about your visitors' demographics (group that you're marketing to), then your next step would be to personalize the experience for them, on an individual basis.
But the possibilities don't end there…
Let's say that once you're done understanding your audience, you decide to use that information to create some special offers for them. You see, this is the great thing about the pixel – because it's almost like a surveillance camera on your website, you can actually push out these special offers directly to those that might need them the most!
For example, let's consider my free eBook about how to buy quality content from people on Upwork or Fiverr or whatever…
Follow me so far?
Great!
Okay, so you've got my free eBook, but let's say that there are 5,000 other people who have also downloaded this eBook.
Once you provide me with your email address, in order to receive the eBook, I immediately send you over to a “Thank You” page, to thank you for providing me with your email address in exchange for the eBook I wrote.
I think it's a fair trade.
But, this post isn't about that. It's about the marketing pixel.
So…
Now, from my pixel data, I see that you, along with 5,000 other people, have all seen this same “Thank You” page.
What if, since I now know that you have the eBook (and have likely taken the 5 – 10 minutes it takes to read through all of it), you're minding your own business on Google, or some unrelated website, or TikTok, or Facebook, or anywhere else you may happen to be, and then you see an advertisement appear on your screen, telling you about a great place to purchase great content from.
Right on time, right?
I'm sure this “coincidence” has happened to you, at some point. It's because of these tracking pixels – these marketing pixels. Someone is marketing to you based on the pixel data collected from you from somewhere on the internet.
So, What's Happening Under the Hood?
What's happening, is that each time your visitor arrives at your website, their computer will send a request to the server hosting your website asking for certain information from what's called an HTTP Header.
This HTTP header will contain the visitor's shared cookies (a type of tracking software), their full URL, their browser/platform information, and whatever else you may have provided in your “tracking code.”
When your server receives this HTTP request, it houses all this information in a collection of variables that can be accessed at any time by you, the website owner.
In other words, if you have a data set that contains thousands of visitors to your website, then you're able to access this information from each visitor's HTTP Header request at any time. Each piece of data is what's called a “variable”.
It's like with computer programming, a variable can be thought of as a box – a placeholder, that holds something inside.
Here are two examples of variable examples in a programming language called Python:
first_name = “George”
last_name = “Washington”
if you can read this and it makes sense, then you can learn to code!
In the above examples, the variable names are on the left, followed by the “equal sign” that isn't really an equal sign. It's an “assignment operator”, which is a nerd term for “you use the equal sign to assign the value on the right (the item inside the box) to the variable name on the left (the actual ‘box')”
Your pixel data will work similarly to this, where you'll have names of variables and the values they hold. Of course there's a bit more to it, but again, this is just an introductory article to get you to understand the value in knowing about the marketing pixel.
Why Do I Need to Know Any of This?
Every business needs to know the marketing pixel. The marketing pixel is what you need to know in order to attract your target audience and make them buy, subscribe, share, donate, opt in, watch, read, click, and a plethora of other things.
If you have a travel blog, wouldn't you like to market to adventurers?
If you know how to find people looking to buy or sell homes, wouldn't you like to target realtors?
If you sell water bottles for dogs, wouldn't you like to target pet owners who love their dogs?
If you own a fitness brand where you sell something like, for example, the best knee brace for running, wouldn't you like to target people who want to start working out and may need support for their knees?
With marketing pixels, you can do all this and so much more! This barely scratches the surface!
The reason you'd need to know this, is so that when you run your advertising campaigns, you can target these specific types of people at a time when they're most likely to be interested in whatever the subject matter pertaining to your ad, is ultimately about.
This is powerful!
Imagine combining your marketing pixel with the SEO aspect of utilizing effective keywords with buyer intent for whichever evergreen products or high ticket affiliate programs you're trying to promote!
Not only will you be gaining organic, laser-targeted traffic, but also, you'll be able to setup marketing campaigns to retarget these same people, and eventually, other people who “look like” your target audience (we'll call it your “lookalike marketing” strategy). That will be explained in a different post, as that's a whole new topic, but definitely one worth writing about!
In Conclusion – Discovering Your Marketing Pixel
Hopefully, this has shed some light on the sheer power of this pixel and why you should be using it. In a later article, which I'll link to at the bottom of this one, we'll discuss how you can actually start using your marketing pixel. It's great to discover the fact that it exists, and to learn a little about it – but it doesn't become truly magical until you start using it.
That's what will work on, soon, so that you'll know what you'll need to do to get started.
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https://swiftcreator.com/discover-your-marketing-pixel/
