Facebook pixel tracking made me rethink my whole Etsy shop setup

I was at a local craft fair in Arlington last weekend and overheard two vendors talking about how their online sales dropped after they disabled cross-site tracking, and it hit me that I've been letting Facebook follow people around my store without asking. Now I'm looking at my shop analytics and realizing how much data I was handing over just for a few targeted ads that barely worked. Has anyone else turned off third-party cookies and seen their sales actually go up or down?

2 comments

2 Comments

hollyg5925d ago

Read a blog post last week that called Facebook pixels "digital fingerprints" and it totally changed how I see those tracking codes. That analogy really stuck with me because people don't realize they're being followed around the web. I turned off all that extra tracking on my shop about two months ago and honestly my sales stayed the same but I felt less gross about the whole thing. The targeted ads from Facebook never really paid off for me anyway, maybe fifteen dollars in sales from fifty bucks spent on ads. It's nice to not have that little privacy guilt in the back of my mind every time I check my shop stats.

simonb9225d ago

The pixel thing is actually more literal than people think. I work in IT security and found out those Facebook pixels can be used to build a shadow profile even if someone never clicks an ad or visits your page. They track your device fingerprint through browser settings, screen resolution, installed fonts - stuff that's unique enough to identify you 9 times out of 10. I disabled mine after realizing it was sending visitor data to Facebook servers even if they didn't have a Facebook account.