3. Actionable Insights 4. Pixels & Performance Marketing 5. Driving Awareness
Pixel firing & performance marketing
In the last section you learned about how understanding shopper behavior with actionable insights across multiple levers can improve your brand’s Return on Ad Spend, grow onsite and offsite customer engagement, and increase sales. If you missed it, revisit here.
In this section, we’ll dive into the importance of implementing marketing pixels in order to build audiences of retail ecommerce shoppers. Plus, learn about the performance marketing tactics, optimizations, and strategies that a retail ecommerce platform, like Pear, can unlock to turn retail into an online marketing channel.
| THE IMPORTANCE OF PIXELING
Marketing pixels play a pivotal role in digital marketing strategies, acting as invisible, yet powerful, data collectors.
All major ad platforms offer unique, session-level tracking pixels for brands. These session-level tracking pixels capture data on user engagement within a “session,” or a single visit on a website. Each time a visitor lands on a website, landing page, or shoppable tool with an embedded tracking pixel, their actions - such as page loads, clicks, and conversions - are recorded as part of that session. This gives marketers the ability to analyze campaign performance in real-time, providing a valuable understanding of engagement, product or content preferences, and overall effectiveness.
Implementing tracking pixels is a crucial step in measuring the impact of a brand’s marketing. Without them, brands operate blindly when it comes to their digital efforts, missing out on opportunities to make data-driven decisions and create highly targeted, effective campaigns where every dollar spent generates maximum value and drives tangible results. DTC brands have been using pixels to their advantage for years. Now, omnichannel CPGs selling at retail can effectively leverage the power of pixels to optimize future marketing strategies, as well.
Pear gives brands the ability to embed all major ad platforms’ tracking pixels into brands’ shoppable tools - e.g. store locator, shoppable PDPs, landing pages, direct-to-cart links, and Pear Connect - and fire pixel events at every step of the retail ecommerce funnel back to advertising platforms. This creates a pool of information about users’ interests and behaviors. These funnel steps include:
- Page load
- Retailer visit
- Add to cart
- Purchase
By firing pixel events back to the ad platforms, brands can begin building audiences of retail ecommerce shoppers on every platform from every shoppable experience, while leveraging the platforms’ machine learning capabilities for automatic optimizations and campaign improvements.
| BUILDING & UTILIZING AUDIENCES
After a brand’s pixels are integrated into their shoppable tools, marketers can use the collected data that’s fired back to their ad platforms to build and segment custom audiences of top-, middle- and bottom-funnel shoppers.
For example:
- A high-intent audience of users who visited the store locator page
- An audience of users who selected Target as a retailer from a brand’s shoppable tool(s)
- An audience of users who added a product to cart without purchasing
- An audience of users who have purchased/frequently purchase a brand’s products
- and more…
Building custom audiences specific to the brand, retail partners, or actions allows for more effective targeting and higher conversion rates.
Once marketers understand the behavior of their existing audience, pixels can help identify similar users on digital platforms. These lookalike audiences consist of people who share characteristics with existing engagers, visitors, or customers, making them more likely to be interested in similar products. For example, using Pear’s add-to-cart and/or purchaser audiences, brands can now build lookalikes of similar users to drive down-funnel paid social and paid search activity.
Pixels also enable retargeting strategies, where ads are shown to users who have previously interacted with a website or a specific product. This personalized approach keeps the brand in front of potential customers, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
By adding all ad network pixels to all Pear-powered experiences, audiences can be built and then retargeted on the ideal media platform for any subsequent campaign to generate the highest return.
| ENABLING & APPLYING OPTIMIZATIONS
With the help of pixels, brands can identify high-performing strategies and eliminate underperformers. Analyzing how users interact with ads (clicks, conversions, etc.), pixels provide insights into the effectiveness of ad campaigns. This data helps in optimizing ad content, placement, and targeting, ensuring better performance and return on investment.
By integrating with existing ad platforms, brands can also tap into their machine learning optimizations to automatically increase their campaigns’ effectiveness - at zero additional cost. This, coupled with audiences of retail ecommerce shoppers, leads to informed marketing budgets and data-driven decision making, ensuring every dollar spent is generating maximum value and driving tangible results at each step in capturing share of wallet.
Check out this case study on how Amylu captured a 10x increase in add-to-cart rates using awareness-optimized campaigns.
Pixels empower marketers with precise data and feedback loops, tailored audience segments, retargeting capabilities, and optimized ad campaigns, all of which are essential in running full-funnel retail ecommerce strategies.
Keep reading to learn how making everything shoppable, leveraging actionable insights, and implementing pixels to enable performance marketing tactics can drive the first step in capturing digital share of wallet at retail: Awareness.