How To Add a Tracking Pixel to beehiiv Through Google Tag Manager

Email marketing results become complicated when you don’t use analytics and tracking. You are playing blindly if you can't tell where a subscriber or a sale came from or if your links were clicked. Tracking pixels play a crucial role in monitoring attribution in email marketing.

For anyone unfamiliar, this post will cover tracking pixels and how you can embed them in your emails. More importantly, I will teach you how to add your tracking pixel to beehiiv using Google Tag Manager.

What Is a Tracking Pixel?

A tracking pixel is a small piece of code that gets loaded when someone visits a website or opens an email.

Pixels help track what users do and if they take certain actions. Advertisers use them to gather online marketing data, optimize websites, drive sales with email marketing, and more.

How Do Tracking Pixels Work?

The sender can include a tracking pixel by adding a special code to their email's HTML code. This code has a link to a pixel server. When someone opens their email, their web browser processes the HTML code and follows the link to open an invisible graphic.

This action is recorded in the server's log files. This method also allows for gathering various information about the user.

For example:

1. Operating system used (even on mobile devices)

2. Types of devices, such as mobile, tablet, or desktop

3. Type of client used, like a web browser or email program

4. Screen resolution of the user's device

5. Time the email was read

6. User's activities on the website during their visit (when multiple tracking pixels are used)

7. IP address

Do you see how useful this can be for email marketers?

How Do I Embed a Tracking Pixel in an Email?

There are two ways to add a tracking pixel to your email.

The first way is to use an email marketing email tool like beehiiv, which gives you information about open rates, replies, and link clicks.

The second way is to manually add a tracking pixel code by pasting it just before the closing tag in the email's HTML code.

Alternatively, you can create your own code and embed it via a transparent graphic that is 1 pixel by 1 pixel in size and embed it in the email.

Of course, this last option is too technical for most marketers. That’s why tools like Google Tag Manager exist.

Is Google Tag Manager a Tracking Pixel?

No, Google Tag Manager is not a tracking pixel. It’s a tag management system that helps you create tags to add to your sites and emails in seconds from both mobile and desktop. It was created to help marketers create and set up their own tracking codes without relying on technical engineers each time.

It’s important to note that Google Tag Manager differs from Google Analytics. If they were to work together, Google Tag Manager would track the behaviors you ask it to and send that information to Google Analytics to be interpreted.

Google Tag Manager can send that information to other tools, not just Google Analytics. In this case, we want to learn how to make it work with beehiiv.

A fair question would be: why would we want to integrate both if we already have advanced analytics tools within beehiiv?

Answer: Since Google Tag Manager supports unlimited tags and it allows you to deploy them in seconds once you are set up, it’s a tool that complements beehiiv’s analytics if you are looking to go deeper into analyzing the behaviors of users on your content.

With this combination, you could get data from more events (especially if you have a more complex content strategy) and send that data to beehiiv to be tracked in one place.

How Do I Add a Tracking Pixel in Google Tag Manager?

This tutorial assumes you have a Google Account. If you don’t have one you will need to create it following these instructions.

If you have a Google Tag Manager account already, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs.

If you don't have a Google Tag Manager account, simply visit this site. Once you are logged into Google, click on “Create Account.”

Then, fill in your information.

1. “Account Name” is an admin name you want to give to this account.

2. Set up the country you are located in.

3. Confirm if you would like to share data with Google and others anonymously.

4. “Container name” is the name of your website.

5. Select “Web” as the target platform.

Your account will be ready to go once you accept the Google Tag Manager Terms of Service Agreement.

Finally, you can add your Google Tag Manager tracking pixel to beehiiv locating this code on your Google Tag Manager dashboard.

Then, you simply head over to your beehiiv dashboard and follow this sequence:

Settings → Website → Analytics

Scroll down to the bottom and add your code on the Google Tag Manager Pixel ID section and click “Save Your Changes.”

Both services are now connected, and any tags that you create on your Google Tag Manager account can be configured to send data to beehiiv.

How Do I Track an Email in Tag Manager?

Remember what I said earlier about Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics? Now that you are integrated with beehiiv, Google Tag Manager will gather information from events that take place on your content and send it to beehiiv, which will now be your dashboard to interpret, analyze, and make decisions.

As you will see, this “partnership” between both services will make your already amazing analytics at beehiiv superior.

I hope that this was helpful to you. I promise you that the more you understand the interaction of your subscribers with your newsletter, the better you will serve them.

If you are not using beehiiv yet, you can learn more by signing up here for free!

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Why Trust Us

Mateo Melgar is a family-first freelancer and digital entrepreneur from Mexico. He started monetizing the internet in 2016 (before “remote work” was cool) and never looked back. Mateo has reached hundreds of thousands of readers through his content marketing and newsletter initiatives with companies like Testimonial, NotionForms, Freelancer Fire, and beehiiv.