Tracking pixel

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Question: What does "tracking pixel" mean?
Answer: A method for tracking actions in which the advertiser places an image tag representing a 1x1 pixel on the page that is displayed immediately after the action being tracked.
 
Its used to measure conversions usually. Lets say you're selling bicycles and you have a bicycle website. At the end of the bicycle purchasing process you'll have a thank you page. You'll place your pixel on this page. If the pixel, is for example, your pixel from Google Adwords, you will see 1 conversion in your bicycle PPC campaign each time a person clicks on one of your ads on Google (or Google's partner sites), then goes to your website, then purchases a bicycle and sees the thank you page that has your pixel. You can use this information to see where the conversion came from and more details about the conversion in question.

If that isn't clear enough, let me know.
 
Say you want to track which Adwords keywords are converting...you can use the tracking pixel Google gives you and put it on the "thank you" page of your site. Google has no way of tracking that for you unless you let them know when a conversion occurs...that's the point of the tracking pixel. So in the case of an online store, the tracking pixel would go on the page the surfer sees after paying.

Some affiliate networks will let you put your pixel on the conversion page of a given offer, though it depends on the offer and the network.

There are other uses...like if you ran your ecommerce store and had the affiliate program through CJ, for instance. In that case, you put CJ's pixel on your conversion page so they know when a commission that involved an affiliate happened.

Keep this in mind...cookies can only be read from the domain they were set on...so when a surfer clicks your CJ affiliate link a cookie is set on that surfer's computer, and then when they finally buy something and end up at the 'thank you' page, CJ's pixel reads the cookie and figures out which affiliate should get paid.
 
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