What are Pixel tags ?

From facebook info:

Pixel tags (also called clear GIFs, web beacons, or pixels) are small blocks of code on a webpage that allow websites to do things like read and place cookies. The resulting connection can include information such as the person’s IP address, the time the person viewed the pixel and the type of browser being used.

We use pixels on and off Facebook, like when you visit our site or one of our partners. Pixels allow us to read any existing Facebook cookies or also place a new cookie on your browser or device. We use pixel tags to customize your experience and learn about how people use products and services. For example, we can use pixel tags to see that a person using a certain browser saw an ad on Facebook and also bought a product from that advertiser. This helps us show advertisers that the ads they run on Facebook are effective. We also may use pixels to help show you an ad on or off Facebook. For example, a partner may use a pixel to tell us when you’ve visited its site so that we can later show you an ad on Facebook.

I am none the wiser, has anyone got examples or can demonstrate how ths technology works ?

it’s a 1x1 clear gif/png that allows them to track other pages because they have some of their content on that page… I used to use one on my file page for analytics. I think that’s what they’re on about anyway…

Yer i kinda figured that out, but wondered how they / you track it ?

I’m under correction but the way I understand it is as follows :
The 1px clear gif /png is inserted into the site or email, since the image has to be requested from the server when a person views the email or accesses the site, the server stats will track the the hits/server requests for that 1px clear gif /png and will deliver the stats based on the amount of times the ‘image’ is ‘requested’.

I’m not quite sure how the cookie law in EU will affect the use of tracking pixels though.

Cheers, i thought it was that obvious. Just never understood, why the use of an image over html request.

Will investigate further thanks

egrove said

Pixel tags are small blocks of code on a webpage that allow websites to do things like read and place cookies.

best reply ever!

@SportTipsWorld using an image is just something to make the browser happy.
eg: I useto put a 1x1 image on my item pages to count the number of unique viewers who viewed my item description. Since you cannot put javascript in the item descriptions you can only use an image. So I did a . The php script outputted a tiny image after recording the visit, otherwise the browser would display a broken image icon.

I stopped doing this because mysql got full and analytics.envato.com came about.

This 1x1 image also allowed me to track which websites were scraping my item description, because I could see the referral url on the php script didn’t match an envato marketplace, so a quick way to find a scrape site and fling off a dmca.

The little image is just a basic way to do analytics when things like javascript are not available or enabled.

Cheers Dave, i wonder if anyone is using data tags (html5) to achieve similar.

dtbaker said
egrove said

Pixel tags are small blocks of code on a webpage that allow websites to do things like read and place cookies.

best reply ever!

@SportTipsWorld using an image is just something to make the browser happy.
eg: I useto put a 1x1 image on my item pages to count the number of unique viewers who viewed my item description. Since you cannot put javascript in the item descriptions you can only use an image. So I did a . The php script outputted a tiny image after recording the visit, otherwise the browser would display a broken image icon.

I stopped doing this because mysql got full and analytics.envato.com came about.

This 1x1 image also allowed me to track which websites were scraping my item description, because I could see the referral url on the php script didn’t match an envato marketplace, so a quick way to find a scrape site and fling off a dmca.

The little image is just a basic way to do analytics when things like javascript are not available or enabled.

That’s really great, thanks for the info :slight_smile:

Maybe, outputting the info to a txt file would solve the MySQL problem. I really don’t use too much analytics.envato.com since it really needs a lot of things.

What sorcery is this? Really ingenious… :slight_smile: