In performance marketing, particularly for direct response campaigns, experienced media buyers understand the importance of keeping latency low as visitors today have such short attention spans.
Most likely, when you send traffic through a campaign on your tracking software, your traffic will come from a number of geo-regions, which is why latency must be low globally, no matter where the visitor is located.
With Thrive‘s Cloud Service, we’ve already achieve extremely fast redirects worldwide, having deployed a truly distributed infrastructure on a massive scale using Amazon Web Services.
But, we asked the question: what if we could eliminate the redirect altogether?
Is a 0ms “redirect” possible?
Introducing the Landing Page Pixel
The answer to that question is: under many scenarios, it is now possible through Thrive’s Landing Page Pixel.
Now Thrive can track the performance of traffic you send directly from the traffic source to your landing page. This means no more campaign URL required to add a redirect between your traffic source and your landing page.
You can use your landing page URL directly in your traffic source as the destination.
Once you go into a campaign in Thrive, you can get the LP pixel here:
To track clicks to this campaign without using the campaign URL as an additional redirect, just copy and paste this pixel code right after the <body> tag in your landing page code. Make sure that the landing page you’re putting the pixel on is in that campaign’s rotations.
Now, you can just add the landing page URL directly to your traffic source to send traffic to, and those clicks will all be tracked in Thrive like any other campaign!
Using code, it will still dynamically pass in any traffic source parameters into the appropriate variable in the landing page pixel automatically. Be sure to read the instructions in the modal that comes up after you click the button.
The pixel will automatically recognize which landing page in your campaign rotation to post clicks to, and the Thrive landing page code will work as normal to redirect visitors to the appropriate offer(s) in your rotation.
When should I be using this Pixel?
Facebook & Google AdWords Campaigns
If you’ve ever bought media via Facebook or AdWords, you know their approval process is incredibly stringent. They want to see the same domain used as your landing page.
When you use a tracking software, most of the time the domain is different than the landing page you send Facebook traffic to, causing your campaign to be disapproved, or worse, your whole account to be banned.
Now, you can use your landing page URL directly in Facebook campaigns as the destination URL! No 3rd party domains to be redirected through.
This should help a lot of Facebook & AdWords accounts to stay alive a lot longer and still have Thrive track everything.
Mobile Traffic
This pixel should be used particularly for mobile campaigns since mobile connection speeds are still generally slower.
Using a pixel without a tracking redirect, can boost performance of your mobile campaigns significantly.
Even though the Thrive redirect is already super fast, eliminating the redirect altogether can still shave off 50ms – 200ms or more on the redirect depending on location.
Using a CDN
To get optimal results, serve your landing pages via a CDN (content delivery network) like MaxCDN or CloudFlare.
Sending traffic directly to your landing page served via a global CDN is the holy grail as there is simply nothing faster.
Track Organic Traffic in Addition to Regular Visits
You may have a landing page split testing as a part of a normal campaign. But, perhaps you want to track organic visits to your landing page separately in another campaign (e.g. visits from Google search, if visitor bookmarked your page, or any other visits not coming from your Thrive campaign URL).
You can use the landing page normally, and create a separate campaign in Thrive to track organic visits to all your landing pages. Just put the LP pixel from that campaign on every landing page.
A landing page with this pixel on it can still be used normally through the campaign URL redirect. Thrive is smart so it will not double count each visit.
When Landing Page Split Testing No Longer Necessary
When you first start a campaign, you may want to split test different landing pages to see which one works the best.
Over a larger sample size, however, it may be clear that one landing page performs particularly well. At that time, you should switch to using the landing page pixel and eliminate the initial campaign redirect since you no longer need to split test multiple landing pages.
Pixel Limitations
Because the traffic isn’t coming through Thrive, you will also not be able to use redirection rules, and your visitors’ cookies are required to be enabled.
Dynamic, Responsive Landing Page Content
While it requires additional coding and more effort, it is still possible to display dynamic landing page content based on some URL parameter, location, device, etc. similar to how a redirect rule setup through Thrive would work.
You would have to utilize some 3rd-party APIs, and depending on the API response, program the landing page to display content particular to that visitor.
APIs for geo-location: MaxMind, ip-api.com
API for device information: WURFL
Others like operating system and browser version requires some code research, but there are a lot of meta data that can be detected easily using code you can implement on your landing page. Depending on the meta data of the visitor, you can dynamically display content similar to using Thrive’s redirect rules.
We are also working on the next iteration to allow you to split test multiple landing pages without a Thrive redirect.
You should now try to use the Thrive landing page pixel whenever possible for an automatic boost in performance. Try it out and see!
Very cool! I’m assuming a double-meta refresh won’t work when using the pixel, correct?
The landing page pixel goes on your landing page, and then you still have an CTA out link on your landing page that goes out to the offer (and yes, you can still rotate/split test offers).
Double meta refresh happens on this out link, so yes, it still works.
Perfect! Makes sense. Looking forward to trying this out for sure!!