What Is the Triple Pixel?
The Triple Pixel is a lightweight script (often inserted into your website’s header) that enables Triple Whale to collect visitor and interaction data in real time. By embedding a small snippet of JavaScript code into your site, the Triple Pixel can monitor:
Page views – Which pages visitors land on and how long they stay
Events and conversions – Actions like add to carts, clicks on buttons or links, form submissions, custom events and conversions (require custom configuration), purchases, etc.
Session information – Timing details such as session duration, visit frequency, and referral sources.
This collected information is then sent to Triple Whale’s data platform, where it can be processed and attributed.
How Visitor Tracking Works
Initial Load
When a visitor arrives at your site, the Triple Pixel automatically loads asynchronously. It generates or retrieves a unique identifier for the visitor that is used to tie future actions to the same user profile.
Event Collection
As the visitor navigates pages, clicks on elements, or completes conversions (like making a purchase or submitting a form), the Triple Pixel captures these actions and sends them securely to Triple Whale’s servers. This data includes metadata (e.g., event name, timestamp, page URL, referring domain, click ids) without storing any sensitive information like credit card details.
Session Management
The pixel keeps track of session boundaries—when a user starts and ends their visit—allowing businesses to better understand visitor behavior over time.
Triple Whale’s ID Graph: The Power of Durable Identity
A key component of Triple Pixel’s technology is the ID Graph, which ensures your visitor data remains consistent and cohesive, even if users switch devices, clear cookies, or browse incognito. Here’s how it works at a high level:
Aggregated Identifiers
The ID Graph securely combines multiple identifiers, such as browser cookies, device signals, and (where available) user-provided details like email addresses. By building a probabilistic and deterministic profile of the visitor, Triple Whale can recognize when two or more sessions belong to the same person.
Unified Profile
The system creates or updates a unified profile for each visitor, ensuring that their behaviors and conversions on different devices or sessions are reconciled into a single record. This means if someone browses on a phone and signs up for email, and then completes a purchase on a laptop (with or without logging in), Triple Whale aims to tie these events to the same user identity.
Privacy and Security
While merging user data, the ID Graph is designed to respect privacy regulations. Personally identifiable information (PII) is handled according to strict compliance guidelines. Identifiers stored by the Triple Pixel are often hashed or anonymized to protect user privacy, ensuring that detailed personal data (like email addresses) is never exposed in raw form.
Real-Time Updates
As new events or identifiers are observed, the ID Graph dynamically updates. If a visitor’s behavior suggests they might share an identity with an existing user profile, the system will enrich that profile, keeping the data current across your analytics.
Benefits of This Approach
Accurate Customer Journeys: By consolidating user data across devices, you gain a more complete understanding of your customers’ journeys—from the first ad click to final purchase.
Better Attribution: Multi-device and cross-domain tracking leads to improved campaign attribution. You can see how each touchpoint contributes to a conversion.
Smarter Retargeting: A robust ID Graph allows for more precise re-engagement strategies. Audiences can be built using a user’s actual journey (and synced to other platforms using Triple Whale’s Customer Segmentation) rather than fragmented session data.
Reduced Data Loss: Even if a user blocks or clears cookies, the ID Graph can still use other probabilistic identifiers to reconnect them to prior sessions.
Staying Compliant
Triple Whale’s Triple Pixel is designed with compliance best practices in mind. While the specific technical details of how each identifier is derived are proprietary, the overarching principle is to respect user privacy and security. Depending on your region, you may need to configure consent banners or data-handling settings accordingly (e.g., GDPR, CCPA). Always consult with legal advisors to ensure your implementation meets local and global privacy requirements.
Key Takeaways
Easy Setup: Drop the Triple Pixel script into your site to immediately start collecting visitor and event data.
Unified Identity: Triple Pixel’s ID Graph ties multiple sessions and devices to a single visitor profile with a combination of deterministic and probabilistic matching.
Robust Analytics: Gain a more accurate view of user journeys, fueling data-driven decisions for marketing, advertising, and customer experience improvements.
Privacy-Conscious: Triple Whale employs hashing and encryption as part of its approach to maintain data integrity and user confidentiality.