Clever branding can turn a trademarked product name into a genericization: when the popular brand name becomes recognized as the moniker for the entire category of product. Kleenex, Band-Aid, Xerox, and Google have all faced genericization. And there may be a novel word to add to the list: Meta Pixel. The term Meta Pixel is the trademarked name for Meta Platforms, Inc.’s (Meta) website user tracking code. As Kleenex is not the only brand of facial tissue, Meta Pixel is not the only website user tracking code on the market. In this article, we will take a look at a few of the players and the offerings in the website user tracking code and data brokerage sector.
The “A” team among website user tracking code developers, of course, starts with Meta, Google, and Adobe. All three offer code that can track user events and then provide analysis of that code to help advertisers perform targeted marketing. Microsoft offers its Clarity product, but this product seems to have less traction in the market.
Other players in this same arena include Snowflake, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, and LogRocket’s UX Analytics, which offers both heat maps and click maps as well as traditional event tracking. As of April 2025, there were over six million websites worldwide with live Meta Pixel codes tracking data, of which, more than two and a half million were in the United States (https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Facebook-Pixel). Those two and one-half million websites actually placed the Meta Pixel third in the US behind Google Analytics and Google Tag Site, respectively (https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics//country/United-States).
Simply creating targeted advertising on a website may be great in and of itself, but what about all that data collected by the companies providing the code and the analytics? Surely, there is a way to monetize that, right? Of course there is! Any data that can be aggregated can be disaggregated and reaggregated to provide new insights. The deluge of data being collected has exploded to the benefit of those who have the data to sell. The data brokerage industry is expected to grow from over $305 billion in 2025 to a whopping $585 billion by 2034 (https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/data-broker-market-11676). This includes data from credit reporting services, with consumer data representing 55% of content sold. Data broker Datarade offers more than 620 data categories from which to purchase customizable data. Their Audience Data service claims to provide the following options (https://datarade.ai/data-categories/audience-data):
With the introduction of Generative and Agentic AI into the field, vendors are advertising that they can offer a wider variety of data analytics including recommendations, rather than just aggregated data. The benefit of products such as these is that missed conversion (sales) opportunities can be addressed quickly by following the suggestions of the AI analytics tool. With the marriage of AI tools and website event tracking code, Google’s GA4 is offering deeper analysis of the data returned and predictive metrics (Google GA4 and AI).
Data is big business, and we are watching as new offerings for data sets, analytics, and solutions come to market daily. While we do not foresee this changing anytime soon, we do believe that savvy consumers will push back on their data being tracked and monetized. As always, Digital Mountain will be there for data privacy and protection.