How Important Is Pixel Tracking for Conversions?

As an affiliate marketer, your primary goal is to earn money through commissions – by sending your visitors to a company’s site that you are affiliated with. That’s pretty clear. But let me ask you, do you have an idea where most of your commissions are coming from?

You see, earning money isn’t just the most important thing when being an affiliate marketer. Beyond this, you must be able to track your conversions. Why is that? Simple. It will let you know where most of your profits are coming from, hence, you can focus your efforts there and make even more.
One of the oldest tricks in the book for tracking conversions is to use pixel tracking. If you’re not entirely sure what pixel tracking is, this is the perfect time to learn about it and use it in your affiliate marketing arsenal.
What Is Pixel Tracking?
So first up, what is pixel tracking? Pixel tracking is merely a 1×1 GIF image that you put on your webpage or in your emails. It can be any GIF image, but using a clear one may be best so that it can easily blend in with any page you have.
This pixel collects data and information from your visitor’s actions, and those are the details that will be very useful for your conversions. You will know which ad got more clicks. You will know which affiliate link is earning you the most money. You will know how many people opened your email. This is all relevant data to any affiliate marketer.
How Does Pixel Tracking Work?
While pixel tracking has been around since the inception of the World Wide Web, it is only now that online marketers have recognized the benefits of pixel tracking. To better understand how pixel tracking works, let me give you these two scenarios:
1. Email Opens
When you send an email with a tracking pixel and the receiver opens the email, your server is notified that the tracking pixel is being downloaded. Hence, you’ll know how many people opened that email.
2. Ad Views
When you put a tracking pixel on a page where you placed your ad, the visitor will automatically download this pixel. When this happens, your server counts that as one view for your ad (one view per IP address). So if you got 5,000 IP addresses, that means you had 5,000 views of the ad.
What Are the Other Uses of Pixel Tracking?
The truth is, the only information you have at hand is how much you are earning from your affiliate promotions. However, the process of how that happened remains a mystery. With pixel tracking, you can now find out how many visitors are clicking through the ad and which ads are the most successful for you.
Additionally, if you are planning to launch an email marketing campaign for your subscribers, you can use this method to do some campaign tracking as well. It will be helpful for you in terms of checking email bounces and gathering survey results that can help you segregate your subscribers based on interest or age group.