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by vassilyk 2380 days ago
This article is brushing a lot of stuff very fast. In reality there is much more to it:

1. You don't need to visit Facebook properties for them to link your activity to you. Unless you're a brand new user and they have never finger printed you...

2. Referrer might be in the pixel tracker, but there is way more to that, including product IDs, product costs, your stage in the funnel (have you Added to Cart but not Purchased?), product category, etc.

3. Everytime a Facebook owned property (or piece of: Like button, FB connect) is 'used' by a device you use, then you can be sure the relation between you and that Pixel call is made (ahem, improved).

Install the Chrome Extension Facebook Pixel Helper, and check what happens when you use an ecom site. You'll be amazed to see what is shared with Facebook (no PII though).

3 comments

For anyone marketing something, installing browser add-ons to cleanly parse tracking params, event calls and adtech/martech used on sites can yield some valuable competitive business insights.

You'd be surprised at how many businesses do things like label things identifying their high value audiences, creative or products just to have it human readable in other reporting with zero obfuscation. Likewise, you can see if they are using any interesting tech you are not.

In particular it would be interesting to go into why and how these 3rd party trackers get included on a page. I mean, the answer to both is obviously "money", but how does it work in practice? Old Navy agrees to implement a facebook tracking pixel in every page? Or it comes "for free" with a like button? etc.
It's part of the onboarding of any Facebook Ads user (i.e., advertiser) to implement the Facebook Pixel on their site.

Without it you're not going to achieve much on Facebook as you need to feedback their system when a particular ad had an impact so that they can model the ad delivery accordingly and get you more converting users. Whatever your conversion is (viewing a page, registering, purchasing).

The Like button primarily allows Facebook to monitor your presence across the internet. Tracking pixels can be deployed on a page by page or site-wide level (included like analytics scripts) to enable remarketing or retargeting.

The site-wide implementation will, for example, enable URLs that meet %string% to be grouped into a "segment". And then you can serve specific ads to that segment while excluding others

The pixel is something Old Navy might actually seek out. They want the insights and increased ad roi that they provide.
Social media ("like") buttons are the ultimate tracking pixels, and they're not even hidden.
Most end users don't know that it's used for tracking their behavior online, so a lot of the meaning on what that's used for is hidden.