Best Practices: Tagging

A comprehensive tagging strategy sets your campaign up for success and provides robust audience insights. This article covers some helpful guidelines and best practices for building your tagging strategy.

Tagging the Campaign Goal

Your tagging strategy should begin with identifying your website’s key performance or engagement metrics. Tagging all key site engagements is vital to a healthy campaign.

Common Campaign Goals for General Advertisers

• Request information

• Email signup confirmation

• Purchase confirmation

• Attend event

Tagging for Full Site Coverage Using Q Pixel

Quantcast strongly recommends that all advertisers install our pixel on their entire site, regardless of the nature of the campaign, unless our Terms and Conditions do not permit the use of our pixel.  The more tag coverage a site has, the stronger your custom audience model will be and the easier it becomes to leverage all Quantcast product offerings. While it’s important to understand what makes the users who are converting on your website unique, it is equally important to understand different paths to conversion throughout your website and differentiate a browser from a serious buyer.

We offer a single tag solution aid in site tagging called Q Pixel. Q Pixel is an easy-to-implement asynchronous JavaScript tag (or pixel) and is an important tool for identifying audiences and building performance models. You can apply the Q Pixel to most pages of the site.

Installing the Q Pixel is required for building audiences from your website and tracking the performance of your campaigns. Once installed, you will be able to leverage all product offerings to:

• Get audience insights by consideration, intent, and conversion

• Understand the path to conversion for each campaign

• Target users who visit different parts of your website

Beyond the Conversion 

Our Data Passback options for both campaign validation and optimization can help in identifying and segmenting traffic based on specific products and services your customers are inquiring about.

Event parameters are an optional JSON-formatted object that you can include when tracking standard and custom events. They allow you to provide additional information about your website visitors' actions for reporting and/or targeting. Once tracked, parameters can be used to further define any custom audiences you create based on a pixel event, or to track special metrics such as Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

Tagging Quality Assurance (QA) Checklist

On the Q Pixel   page:

1. Check that the Base Pixel has been correctly implemented.

   • This allows our pixel to track activity on all web pages that the pixel is implemented on.

   • If you are running retargeting, this gives our model more opportunities to reach users who have visited any part of your site.

   • If the base pixel is implemented, an event called PageView populates under Pixel Events. Use the Verify URL tool to check if your site is correctly pixeled.

     

2. Confirm that the conversion event is tagged and passing back the desired metrics

   • Click the eye icon to check if the event is passing back data.

     

   • ROAS campaigns need revenue data passed back

   • Product category or customer type data passback provides more information on what kind of audience is converting and provides better audience insights within Audience Planner.

   • Select the appropriate naming convention for your event. For data passback events, select from a set of pre-defined event names or create a custom event name.

     

3. Create rule-based events to differentiate pages on your site.

   • Click the eye icon to check that the events created are correctly firing on the desired URL.

   • With naming conventions, it's important to correctly name the event for tracking purposes. This helps you better understand on what kind of audience is going to a specific page and compare audiences within Audience Planner.

   • Breaking out different rule-based events for all web pages can influence planning for a more upper funnel and traffic objective campaign.

To learn more about how to install Q Pixel click here.