The third-party pixel has long been a fundamental enabler of online marketing and retargeting – the tiny crucial link from advertiser to audience. But from a technology management perspective, the pixel is a big thorn in the side of your IT department. And let’s face it, anything that’s burdensome for IT becomes a hassle for you, too.
At the root of this complexity is the fact that in a pixel tracking model, your audience segments are only as good as your pixel pool. In fact, your pixel pool often is your segment. If you want to cookie Avid Skiers, you need Avid Skier pixels on Avid Skier pages – the more the better.
Each time a new Avid Skier page is created or altered is another manual coding task for IT. And over time, each of those pixels must be tracked and managed as web pages come and go. Each segment has its own pixel pool, and the segment is never really complete.
There’s also the latency baggage that come with pixels. Every new tag increases your page load time, which looks bad for the web team (and isn’t so great for the user experience, either). There are numerous studies demonstrating the impact of increased page load time on website abandonment, too. (See http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)
Pixel-free data collection, on the other hand, eliminates the entire manual process of adding and managing pixels and their load-slowing tendencies. Data collection becomes a virtualized process that is enabled one time. From enablement forward, all page views are automatically logged. Even new pages that may be added to your site will be logged with no additional work.
Creating a segment is similarly straightforward. You identify the pages of your site that define that segment by URL pattern. For example, the Avid Skier segment could be defined as any visitor to a page that contains the words ski or skiing in the URL.
Without a single call to IT or any coding whatsoever, you can capture user behavior (browsing, searching, carting, buying, etc.) for all your visitors across all site pages. If your website is served via Akamai (and many are) there’s nothing at all to deploy. Headache solved.
There are of course plenty of strategic benefits to going pixel free, too (which we’ll cover in an upcoming post), but for many marketers, eliminating the technical hassles and data complexity of the third-party pixel is reason enough. If your site performance is crucial or your IT team threatens rebellion at every pixel request, we need to talk. Pixel free is vastly simpler, easier to manage and a more sustainable approach to understanding your audiences.