When a visitor lands on your homepage and accepts analytical cookies, it’s important that the Billy Grace pixel fires immediately, without requiring a page reload. This article explains how this works and how you can verify that it’s working correctly on your site. If this is not set up correctly, we cannot track where the visit originated from, and the visit (and potential sale) will be attributed to 'direct' in Channel Performance.
How it works
The Billy Grace pixel is designed to trigger as soon as cookie consent is given, without needing a page refresh. When a user accepts analytical cookies through your cookie banner, the following happens:
Consent is stored in the browser (typically via a Consent Management Platform like Cookiebot, CookieYes, etc.).
The pixel is initialized and fires within the same page session, as long as it’s configured to respond to the consent event.
This ensures that visits and conversions are tracked immediately and aren’t lost due to missing reloads. This can be spotted in-platform when the attribution to 'Direct' in Channel performance is higher than expected.
How to verify it
You can follow these steps to check whether the pixel is firing right after cookie consent:
Open an incognito/private window in your browser.
Navigate to your homepage where the Billy Grace pixel is implemented.
Open the Developer Tools (see #1 in screenshot below) - (press
F12or right-click > "Inspect") and go to the Network tab (see #2 in screenshot below).In the filter bar, type
billy(see #3 in screenshot below) to filter pixel-related requests.Accept (analytical) cookies via the cookie banner.
Watch for a network request to the Billy Grace pixel.
You should not need to reload the page, or navigate to any next/other page — the pixel request should fire immediately.
📌 Tip: Disable ad blockers or browser extensions that might interfere with network requests.
