Live Tag Overview

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Live Tag

The Quantcast Live Tag is a universal tracking pixel that can be easily installed on your website.  Once installed, you have the ability to define and track various site events, view site activity for the past seven days, and retrieve codes required to track activity on your website.

Accessing the Live Tag Events

In the Quantcast Platform, use the navigation menu on the top left of the screen, then select Q Pixel under Assets.

Your Event page will look similar to this:

Q Pixel Page

Live Tag Buttons

On the Event page, there are three buttons: Add Event, Grab Pixel Code, and Verify URL.

  • Add Event: Create data-passback and rule-based events for activities on your site. See the Track Events article for more information on rule-based events or data pass-back events.

  • Grab Pixel Code: This includes your base pixel and P-code. The base pixel tags all pages on your website, and the P-code is a unique identifier for your account. See Install Q Pixel for a guide on installing your base pixel.

  • Verify URL: Test if your site has been correctly tagged. If the Live Tag has been implemented correctly, the status will display as "Active".

Pixel Activity

The Pixel Activity chart shows you all activity seen on webpages that have a pixel implemented and are associated with your p-code. You can filter which events are displayed in the graph for the past 7 days.

Pixel Chart

Pixel Events

Pixel Events are created within the platform through the "Add Event" and "Grab Pixel Code" features. 

The pixel events table shows the following information:

  • Event: The name of the event

  • Type: The type of event.: Rule-based or data pass-back

  • Status: The current status of the event: Active or inactive

  • Total Impressions: The total number of impressions for the event

  • Eye icon: The last 20 records of the event triggered

    • Triggered Date: The date and time the event triggered

    • Domain and Path: URL of the event triggered on

    • Order ID: For Order ID data pass-back events

    • Revenue: For Revenue data pass-back events

To better understand your audience and events, read the article on Campaign Audiences.

Technical Details

Speed: The Live Tag is asynchronous. It loads in the background and should not slow down your page's load time. 

Reliability: Quantcast uses a globally distributed server infrastructure. Traffic is routed to the most appropriate server using DNS and BGP techniques to achieve the lowest possible latency.

Trusted & Privacy-Safe: We do not sell your audience or share it with any other advertiser.

Security: Our Internet-facing systems are regularly updated and hardened against attack. We regularly engage external penetration testing firms to assess the security of our infrastructure and implement several security measures to restrict network and server access. 

Committed to Consumer Transparency & Choice: Quantcast is a Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) member and participates in the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) Self-Regulatory Program.

Live Tags

Live Tags consist of two snippets of JavaScript:

  • Base Tag is required to track any website activity

  • Data Pass-back Tag builds upon the base tag to measure specific actions and capture passed-back variables.

Base Tag

The Base Tag serves as the foundation for the Live Tag. It needs to be added to every page of your website to enable data passback tags and rule events to function and to build audience data from all traffic on your site.

Place the Base Tag in your website's <head> section so it appears on all pages you wish to track. Quantcast strongly recommends that all advertisers we work with install our pixel on their entire site, regardless of the campaign's nature, unless our Terms and Conditions permit otherwise. The more tag coverage a site has, the stronger your custom audience model will be and the easier it will be to leverage all Quantcast product offerings. You can also enable Enhanced Matching, which helps improve the quality and accuracy of the audiences you create on our platform. 

For more information on installing the base tag, click here

If you are using a tag manager, please refer to the instructions for your tag manager, which are linked in this section

If you use Google Analytics, the Quantcast Pixel will collect your Google Analytics ID, which gives you the option to integrate your Quantcast campaigns with your Google Analytics account.

Data Pass-back Tag

URL-Based Event

Once the base pixel is installed, you can create URL -Based Events to track activity on your website. Rule events let you trigger events automatically based on URLs visited or user interactions with specific DOM elements.

For example, to observe visits to your website's homepage "www.website.com/homepage", you can create a rule. Name the rule-based event "Homepage", and use the condition "URL" contains "homepage". Once saved, the "Homepage" event will fire anytime "www.website.com/homepage" loads. 

URL Events are configured based on a URL or DOM conditions and can be added to any page as long as the base tag is implemented. For instructions on how to create rule-based events, click here.

Our tagging best practice article includes guidelines on recommended rule events. 

You can verify if a label is firing correctly by using the Verify URL tool on the top right corner of the Q Pixel page. 

Data Pass-back Event

Data pass-back events are used for site events that require the pass-back of pre-specified variables, such as revenue, product category, or order ID. These events can also be used where an action cannot be tracked using a URL condition, such as a button click. An example would be tagging a "Purchase Now" button and passing back revenue and product category.

These events require additional code beyond the base tag.  For more information on installing a data pass-back tag, read our article on Data Pass-back and Advanced Installation: Full Tag.

add new event

Learn More

Track Events discusses more information on events. To read about Tagging Best Practices, please see Best Practices: Tagging or Best Practices: Tagging by Vertical