The Risks Associated with Marketing Tags and Pixels

These seemingly unobtrusive code snippets allow for third party companies and agencies to track visitor behavior on your website. This technology has many benefits, some of which include campaign analytics, personalization, and retargeting. These third parties always tout the benefits of their tags but rarely cover the hidden costs and risks associated with them.

Death by a thousand paper cuts

According to Amazon, 100ms of latency costs them 1% of sales. While these numbers vary between retailers, the fact is that website speed directly affects sales. This is where marketing pixels can sometimes do more damage than good. While one tag doesn’t seem like much, they can quickly add up and significantly slow down your pages. The number of tags on your website can easily get out of control if you are not on top of each and every tag, and if those tags are piggybacking additional tags. Piggybacking is when a third party tag includes additional tags, which can then include additional tags, and so on. Piggybacking tags allow for ad networks to increase audience reach, but it can also dramatically increase the number of tags on your page.
Taking a look at 10 of the top online retailers using the Ghostery Browser Extension, the average number of marketing pixels was 11. It was easy to find retailers with 40+ marketing tags on their homepage, while Amazon.com had 2. I encourage you to audit your own website using Ghostery and ask your team if all of the tags are necessary.

Do you trust them with everything?[...]

To read the whole post and interact, please visit the SogetiLabs blog: The Risks Associated with Marketing Tags and Pixels