What the hell is a marketing pixel?

Almost everyone who has worked in marketing has heard of marketing pixels at one point or another. Very few people thought can give a completely clear definition of what the hell they are. Just for the sake of completeness, we'll be presenting 2 definitions. The old one and the new one.



The old definition of a pixel is a 1x1 image that gets loaded on a site. This image loading then tells Facebook/Google/Etc. that someone's on your site. The image loading also includes info like the ip address, device, etc. You would then define an event by someone visiting an url. An example of this is in the image below:

Thats, of course, a thank you page. With the old pixel you set the purchase event to be when someone reaches this page. Thats it!



The new definition of a marketing pixel is quite more sophisticated. Instead of an image, its code. The code is loaded on your site. The code does a lot of things. Lets set that aside for a minute. The code will look a bit like this:

Now ignoring that horrible, horrible thing above, the long and short is that it loads a javascript code file into your browser. Which then does a lot of things.



Lets go into those things 😀