Good post on how conversion tracking works
December 3rd, 2007
Greg Yardley wrote a nice post explaining how advertiser use pixels (also known as beacons) to track conversions. Nice read for those that don’t understand how conversion tracking happens.
I will disagree with Greg though that we haven’t had privacy online for a while — even though our actions are being tracked they are all on an anonymous basis. Facebook is the first that wants to tie this with a name. There’s a big difference between being able to say:
“A user with cookie ID #ace8748dff clicked on a Netflix ad at 10:45am on Nov 29th on mikeonads.com after having seen it four times and then signed up for a 30 day trial.”
and
“Mike Nolet bought Netflix today.”
I’m fine with the former, but the latter kind of freaks me out!
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:51 am
That is an interesting article. In our experience website owners find it difficult to understand visitor behaviour even with good systems such as Google Analytics.
We have recently come across an excellent piece of software that not only allows them to monitor individual user behaviour in real time, but also facilitates direct engagement between visitor and user. This has been increasing conversions by an average of 15% in the websites we have implemented it in.