[afro88]

> For example, the ability for marketers to easily place their Facebook conversion/retargeting pixels on the Teespring site, meant that affiliates now had the visibility needed to profitably spend their own money promoting Teespring campaigns via paid acquisition channels (mainly Facebook ads).

Out of pure curiosity, can someone decode this into non-marketer speak for me? Not trying to be rude, I just genuinely have no clue what it means (I'm a developer who knows nothing about marketing).

[scrapcode]

Teespring allows users to place certain devices (tracking pixels, etc) on their Teespring site. This allows individuals to know which campaigns their conversions are coming from, and therefor where they should allocate most of their marketing funds.

[nana_gb]

^^^ This is correct, but I will break it down further with the assumption you are starting from zero knowledge.

Let's say you are buying ads from FB. It's common practice to test multiple ads. (Images, Headlines, Ad copy in the body, targeting (who the ads will be shown to).

The hope and idea is that one or more of these ads will work better than the rest. It's a bit like how YC invests in a lot of startups, not all succeed, the ones that do get more money, the rest run out of cash and go out of business.

To help you see which ads are working FB cookies and tracks everyone who clicks your ads. However they don't know if a click results in a sale/lead unless you send them confirmation that a sale/lead happened.

That's where the pixels come in. The term pixel can sometimes be confusing, because these days it's usually a snippet of javascript that makes a call to FB. I haven't looked at the back end implementation, but I assume the JS loads an image.

In short, this allows FB to attribute the sale/lead to a particular ad. With enough data, you can then weed out the ads that are wasting money, and focus on the ones that work. Al lot of time you can optimize further by building out variations of the winning combination.

All this is cool, but if you don't control the conversion page, and this is the case for 99.999% of affiliates you can't place your FB pixel unless the company you are working with provides a means for you to do so. Sometimes it's manually done, other times it's automate like what Teespring did.

QUICK PRIVACY WARNING: Placing a 3rd party pixel code on a conversion page has to potential to leak private information to the 3rd party. This usually happens if your customer's info is in the url variables of the page hosting the pixel. When the page loads, all the info is passed to the 3rd party pixel in the referer info.