What is a 1st Party Pixel?
Having already read what pixels and CAPI are, it time to finally define what a 1st party pixel is! A 1st party pixel is a server, with its own pixel (hence the first party name!) that collects data in your name. It does the same things that a good CAPI tech/tool does but goes even further.
The 1st party pixel should ensure a few things:
- Its hosted under your url. So the javascript would be in something like: https://www.your-website-url.com/db.js
- Its replicating the things that the marketing pixels do natively, like creating the browser id and click id cookies
- Its fully integrated with your ad platforms, so the events data are sent using the Conversion API without any issues
- Its logging the things that are ocurring, such as ow many events were recieved? How many events to facebook had a click id? How many events had an email? etc.
- It has a notification system for things that shouldn't happen. For example, a purchase event without an email? Best let the team know because that shouldn't happen
- Its collecting data and sending it to your own systems, so you can do some analysis later
Admittedly, most people whom are reading this have likely done so because they've realized their pixel is getting blocked, but thats actually only a symptom. The disease is:
You don't actually know if the data is being sent to ad platforms correctly
Getting blocked is only an example of when you're not sending data to the ad platforms correctly. You could also be missing data (such as lacking an email in a purchase event) or you could be sending wrong data (such as not formating a phone number). In any of these scenarios, the result is the same:
Bad Data means Bad Conversion means Bad ROAS
A first party pixel, therefore, is meant to solve the key issue:
Only good data is being sent to the ad platforms
