In our work, we’ve found that all companies, big or small, struggle with being in control of their own tracking Pixels. We’re what you could call “Pixel fixers” (or at least we like to call ourselves that). When Facebook advertisers need any technical services, they give our agency a call. Now, fixing Pixels is only one part of the technical work we provide, but it often plays a larger role than we expect.
Take a recent client of ours, for example. They came to us after installing a new app, one that we found had an intermittent problem with its tracking. If you added a few products to your cart, an “add to cart” event for each item added would have been sent through the Pixel. No surprise there, right? But that’s not where the problem arose.
Say you left the site before purchasing any of the items in your cart. Then you came back to the site a few days later, and the same products were still in your cart. Little did you (or our client) know that on your second site visit, the site’s Pixel tracked the items in your cart (yes, the ones that were previously there) as new events.
Now, an issue such as this may not cause immediate or drastic harm, but we don’t advise our clients to use dirty data. Overreporting your events will only throw off the perspective of your site’s ad manager, and likely will lead unideal remarketing campaigns in the future.
The moral of the story here is to become the master of your own Pixel. This means you must know what decisions your apps are trying to make for you and your site’s data. Only you know what’s best for your site. The solution is simple: pay attention to your apps, regulate event tracking on your own terms, and stay in control of your Pixel.
