What is a Tracking Tag?

Get insights into audience behavior with tracking tags.

A tracking tag is an HTML code snippet that loads whenever a user visits a website. They provide marketers with extremely valuable insights like audience behavior and ad performance while helping them improve their online offers and create more personalized ads.

Tracking tags function similarly to cookies. One major distinction is that cookies are stored on an internet browser, like Chrome or Firefox, whereas tracking tags are stored on the hard drive and send information directly to the server.

Retargeting tag: tracks how the user interacts with the site — such as what products they viewed or what pages they interacted with — with the intention of putting products or information in front of the user that has already caught their attention.

• Example: User visits a brand's website, leaves, and then receives an ad for the same brand on another website.

While retargeting tags track visitor behavior before they make a purchase, conversion tags track actual purchases and completed goals.

Important: In order to create a retargeting tag, the audience type for the ad group must be Site Retargeting.

Conversion tag: tracks users that have completed a certain clickable action — such as made a purchase, clicked on a CTA, watched a video, etc. — in order to help marketers connect revenue and sales to specific ads. 

• Example: User fills out a form on harley-davidson.com and is forwarded to a thank you page with a conversion tag that's tracking the "conversion" of filling out a form.

We recommend using Google Tag Manager to implement tags on your website. Any questions about this can be answered by selecting the chat icon in the bottom right corner.