To track how your social media campaign is doing, you need the right tracking setup. This gives you valuable data to tweak your ads and get great results. In this post, we'll walk through a few key basics you don't want to miss in your technical setup.

Before diving in, look at where you're starting. Review your website to see what's actually possible with your current setup. You also need a clear campaign goal so you know what data really matters. Are you building brand awareness or driving sales? Below, you'll find a few essentials to include so you can measure your results properly.

Install your pixel
To get started, add a pixel to the channels you plan to use. A pixel tracks actions people take on your website, showing you how effective your ads are. Here are a few guides to help you set them up:

Install Snap Pixel
Create and install a Facebook pixel
Install the Pinterest tag
Install TikTok Pixel
Create a Twitter website tag

With your pixel, you can:

Reach the right people

Make sure your ads find the right audience—people who will actually take action. You can also find new potential customers using data from past visitors.

Boost conversions
Use automatic bidding to focus on people most likely to buy or sign up on your site.

Measure ad performance
Get a clear picture of what happens when people see and click your ads.

Google Tag Manager
You can manage your pixels as tags inside Google Tag Manager. GTM is a free tool that lets you easily manage tags for your website and mobile apps. It collects user data and tracks how people move and interact across your site. You can then use these insights to optimize for better results, like more sales. Use the same setup across all social channels so your data is easy to compare.*New iOS updates rolled out in 2021, meaning your business needs to own its data, ad account, and pixels. Read more here .

Google Analytics
Connect GTM to Google Analytics to gather all your data in one place. These stats help you understand what's working so you can improve your campaigns.

Key events you can track based on your goals:

Pageviews
Shows when someone visits your site. This helps build retargeting audiences, exclude certain users, and map out the customer journey. It's also great for reaching cold audiences.

Interactions per visit

This is broken down into a few helpful metrics:

Views on key pages (like a specific product page), how far users scroll, and time spent on your site. For B2B, tracking specific page views is often enough to segment audiences based on how they engaged with your landing page.

Conversions

Business-to-consumer (B2C)
In B2C, you'll mainly want to track purchases and transactions. To help shoppers finish their purchase, use clear calls-to-action that guide them smoothly from your ad to checkout. Make sure your conversion values are accurate, and watch out for currencies if you sell internationally. You can set pixel values manually or pass them dynamically.

Business-to-business (B2B)
In B2B, the focus shifts from instant purchases to lead generation. A lead could be someone downloading a guide and sharing their name, email, or phone number for your sales team. On LinkedIn, you can easily capture these with Lead Gen Forms.

View content
See which content users check out so you can retarget them with relevant ads later. You can also set a minimum time spent on the page before triggering this event.

Store visits
Run a physical shop? You can connect in-store data—like loyalty club purchases—to see if people who saw your ads ended up buying in person.

UTM tags
Add UTM parameters to your ad links to see exactly where your campaign traffic comes from and compare ads against other channels.

Test your setup
Before launching, use GTM's Preview mode to test that everything fires correctly. You can also use Chrome pixel helper extensions to verify your events.

Summary

GTM makes it simple to collect data and manage pixels across all your channels. That data is pure gold for fine-tuning campaigns. Just remember to keep your main campaign goals front and center. Keep it simple—stay close to what drives your business.

Good luck! And as we like to say: test, learn, and improve for the best results. Don't forget to stay in the loop by subscribing to our newsletter!