Why Pixels Don't Work for Conversion Tracking

Using pixel tracking to figure out which of your channels and campaigns drive the most sales is like rowing a canoe with a tennis racket—you’re not going to get anywhere.

We get it, that hurts to hear, but your brand, and your bottom line, will be better for it.

There are three major reasons tracking pixels don’t work: they’re unreliable, their function is too limited, and they’re a waste of valuable company resources to implement. All of that is before we mention accelerating data privacy regulation that’s crippling this technology’s ability to collect and store user information. (That’s a meaty topic for another post.)

If you need a refresher on how they work or the different types, check out our guide to tracking pixels before you jump back into this article.

Why pixels don’t work for conversion tracking

Long story short, pixels aren’t reliable—and it doesn’t make a difference if you’re talking about tracking pixels in emails or conversion pixels.

If they’re not efficiently and accurately monitoring potential customer behavior, they’re not giving you a complete or reliable picture of your conversions. There are three major reasons they don’t work for conversion tracking for the sophisticated DTC business: they’re unreliable, their function is too limited, and they’re a drag on the company to implement.

Reliability

In order for a pixel to fire and send information back to the business, it must be placed on the correct page or in the correct email. For example, a conversion pixel should be placed on the thank you or order confirmation page to track sales from a specific ad campaign. If the conversion pixel is placed on the wrong page, the information sent back will not be accurate.

But even placing them on the correct page is no guarantee. Conversion pixels not placed correctly on the page may not fire at all, resulting in no data being collected from those user visits. Setting them up is rife with human error, and there’s no way to recapture this lost information on your customers once a pixel error is discovered or even corrected.

Load time can also impact pixel accuracy. Even though they’re small images, tracking pixels may not fire properly if the load time is too long—and you can’t always prevent that by controlling their file size.

Yes, file size can affect load times, but so can the server and traffic on the website. Ironically, a surge in interest on your site can hurt your sales by preventing your tracking pixels from firing, leading to a missed opportunity to collect critical information about your customers.

Functionality

Tracking pixels seem like a valuable tool for businesses and advertisers, but their functionality doesn’t match how your customers shop. Marketing pixels fall down if you’re trying to track the customer journey, especially if your product is expensive.

The journey from discovery to conversion is often complicated, with people browsing, leaving, and returning later. Tracking pixels aren’t granular enough to track these different interactions and give credit to the marketing campaign that truly drove the final purchase.

Pixels can only track the interactions that occur on the website or email where they are placed. Let’s say you have a tracking pixel on an ad and a conversion pixel on your website’s thank you page. Your product is expensive—over $250—so the customer clicks on your ad but ultimately bounces from your website because they need to consider this expensive purchase. Later, after they’ve done research and checked their budget, they return to the website directly and buy your product.

In this situation, the tracking pixel will only track the interactions on the website, not the ad. The ad that introduced this customer to your product will get no credit for its role in the final purchase. If you have a retargeting pixel on a campaign that goes to this person, that pixel may attribute the sale to that campaign rather than the awareness campaign they first saw.

This tracking pixel limitation can lead to incomplete or inaccurate attribution of the sale to the correct marketing campaign. You’re at risk of turning off campaigns that effectively drive sales because your pixels are misattributing the conversions.

Implementation

Tracking pixels also seem simple but are tedious to set up. A company looking to make data-driven decisions about their marketing campaigns probably wants to track multiple customer touch-points, which requires adding tracking pixel code to every critical page of the website.

Proper implementation of tracking pixels demands dedicated technical resources that many marketing teams underestimate. From pixel placement and tag management to testing and validation, the process requires specialized knowledge and consistent maintenance to ensure accuracy. Without dedicated oversight, implementation errors frequently occur, leading to data gaps, misattributed conversions, and ultimately, flawed marketing decisions. Many organizations discover too late that pixel management isn’t a one-time task but an ongoing technical commitment that diverts resources from strategic initiatives.

Most critically, though, pixels require a 4-6 week “training window” during which they only gather information about your business and potential customers’ behaviors. That’s a month or more in which you’re not getting insights about whether your campaigns are effective, potentially draining key budget dollars on ineffective campaigns.

They can actually hurt conversions

Sorry, but it gets worse from here. Yes, using tracking pixels can actually hurt your conversions.

Adding tracker pixels can slow down your website, increasing the chances that potential customers bounce. Even milliseconds are critical for website performance; a 100-millisecond delay in load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. A two-second delay in load time can increase bounce rates by 103%.

If your website is slow, your potential customers won’t stick around to engage with your content or make a purchase, even if your product could perfectly fit their needs.

A slower website also has downstream effects that can lead to fewer people finding your business. Google uses website speed as a ranking factor, so your website is less likely to show up at the top of search results if it’s slow.

People don’t scroll very far down Google’s search results page; in fact, the #1 position is worth as much as spots 2, 3, 4, and 5 combined. The result is grim: if your website slows down, your Google rank drops, decreasing your organic views, click-throughs, and conversions. Even a one-spot drop is enough to cripple your marketing efforts.

What about Facebook pixels?

Facebook pixels or Meta pixels, like other tracking pixels, cannot provide accurate data for a business. These platform-specific pixels have the same limitations as tracker pixels used on websites, in emails, or on ads, including:

An inability to track users who block cookies or use ad blockers
Implementation and placement errors

The solution

Why not use Google Analytics instead of relying on tracker pixels? A couple of reasons:

Accuracy: The free version of Google Analytics only samples your traffic, so you cannot account for all leads and potential conversions. Google also has an incentive to over-attribute conversions to Google Ads and doesn’t account for impressions that happen on other platforms.
Expense: If you don’t want sampled data, you’ll need a paid version of Google Analytics. That’ll knock a clean $150,000 off your runway per year.
Speed and Ease: To track accurately, you must set up and correctly configure your sales dashboards. This takes time and experience.

We intentionally designed the Prescient dashboard to clear these hurdles. We consider accuracy a must-have and never sample your data. We’re also independent, which means we don’t care if Facebook performs better for you than AdWords. We just want to be right.

We also know your time is better spent actioning on data than sifting through it or setting up dashboards. That’s why we made sure you could set up your account and add all of your campaign sources with a couple of clicks of a button. We also aggregate all your data sources in one place, so you don’t have to hop from one platform to the next to check on your marketing campaign performance.

Simply put, Prescient is the best solution for accurately, quickly, and affordably tracking which of your marketing campaigns is driving the most conversions.of tracking pixels requires greater attention to privacy practices and user consent.