Conversion Tracking using Addue: Find out where your conversions are coming from

Conversion tracking links are used to determine the performance of advertising channels. You can drive traffic from your ad placements to Addue conversion tracking links instead of directly to your target website where the conversion takes place. (It is also possible to track conversions using Addue without the use of explicit conversion links, allowing you to use your own final URL as the destination URL of your ads. See the note at this end of the article for more on this.) Before redirection to the target website, Addue will track visitors using a combination of cookies and fingerprints capable of handling most modern browsers. If and when a conversion takes place on your website later, Addue will check to see if the visitor completing that conversion has a tracking cookie present or matches a browser fingerprint. If so, Addue can then conclude that that particular visitor came through the ad placement you were monitoring.

Conversion tracking can therefore be used to optimize your advertising ROI. In internet marketing it is fundamental to know where your conversions are coming from, and the average cost of those conversions. This in turn determines how much your advertising budget for that particular advertising channel should be and avoids massive under-spending on a good channel or over-spending on a bad one.

To get started with conversion tracking, go to your Addue account page, choose “Insert New Link” and select the “TR – Conversion Tracking Link” option. The conversion tracking link form comes up on the next page:

 

Fill out the form as above, using “tutorial5” as the linkset ID, but instead of “traffikoo.com” for the destination URL, choose a website under your control. This is important since to complete the conversion tracking setup you’re going to need to insert a small piece of code on the checkout page of that website shortly.

Submit the link. Under List/Edit/Delete links you can find the link you just inserted and click on “tutorial5” to bring up the linkset. You should see a screen like the below, but with traffikoo.com replaced with your target website:

 

Conversion tracking linksets should have just one single link, as in this example. There should be no other links present, including any other TR links, DR links, etc. All that is needed and all that should be present in each TR linkset is a single TR link defining the destination URL as above.

The link to use to track conversions is as given in the linkset listing page at the top of the listing:

https://addue.com/r/track/246/tutorial5
(where 246 will be replaced with your unique account ID on Addue)

You should now place this link as the destination URL in your advertising channels and send traffic to it instead of directly to your website. (And if they don’t allow this, see the update at the end of this tutorial for linkless conversion tracking).

This completes the first part of the conversion tracking setup. The second part is placing a small piece of code (known as a “tracking pixel”) on the confirmation page on your website where conversions are marked as completed. This is typically a thank you page of some kind which is presented to site visitors after they have completed a conversion (filled out a leadgen form, checked out a shopping cart, etc.). We need this page to report back to Addue that a conversion has happened so that Addue can in turn check whether that conversion was coming from the tracking link you are monitoring.

This is the general format of the code which needs to be inserted in the confirmation page on your website by your webmaster:

<img src=”https://addue.com/t/track/ACCOUNT-ID/OPTIONAL-TYPE/OPTIONAL-ORDER-VALUE/OPTIONAL-TEXT1/OPTIONAL-TEXT2″>

The code snippet can be inserted anywhere between the body tags of the confirmation page. Replace ACCOUNT-ID with the unique ID Addue assigned to your Addue account (246 in this example). The other values following ACCOUNT-ID are optional and can be ignored for the moment. So a complete tracking pixel could look like:

<img src=”https://addue.com/t/track/246″ />

Each time a conversion takes place, this will tell Addue to check to see if a visitor coming from any of your tracking links is responsible. If yes, then a conversion will be recorded by Addue as having taken place. You will then be able to see details of that conversion in your “Conversion Activity” report on Addue (under the Results section of your main Addue account interface).

For the purposes of this tutorial, we placed some tracking pixels on a page on a domain we control (traffikoo.com) and created a couple of conversions there after clicking on the tracking link by then visiting the thank you page where we placed the tracking pixel. You can see the results in the Conversion Activity report:

 

 

 

Each conversion Addue has determined as coming from the tracking link is listed in this report as a line in the report, including data such as the IP address, refering URL (which should be the confirmation page you placed the tracking pixel on), etc.

The optional fields in the tracking pixel can be used by your webmaster to send further data such as shopping cart values to the conversion activity report. You can report a conversion type in the type field, shopping cart total in the order total field, and further informational text information in the two text fields provided. An example of a tracking pixel using all these options would be something like:

<img src=”https://addue.com/t/track/246/purchase/55.44/Socks+Pants+Shirt/John+Smith” />

(Text fields must be url encoded, which requires replacing spaces by “+”)

The conversion type allows you to report different conversions types such as purchase, lead, subscription, etc. You could place different tracking pixels with different conversion types on different thank you pages of your site corresponding to those actions to capture this information.

The example above will place “purchase” as the conversion type, $55.44 as the order total, and the other text data under “Text Fields” so you can easily see exactly what the conversion was just by looking at your report on Addue.

If you want to use the optional parameters, you need to use them from left to right to keep the tracking pixel structure above, and insert placeholders for any that you don’t need if they precede the ones that you want to use. So if you don’t need conversion types but want to pass an order value, you would need to enter a placeholder (e.g. “default”) for the conversion type. Likewise, if you don’t need conversion types and order totals but want to enter text1, you can enter placeholders such as “default” and “0.00” for the conversion type and order total. (If you don’t do this and just pass text1 without conversion type and order total fields, Addue will just assume your text1 value is a conversion type.)

If you have many conversions in your Conversion Activity reports, you can download the entire report for various time periods using the download links provided at the bottom of the conversion activity report page. Using this feature you can export your conversions reports to a spreadsheet program like Excel, for instance, and carry out further detailed analysis of ROI offline.

The cookie Addue places on visitor web browsers to track their activity after clicking on an Addue link has a 30 day lifetime. In other words, if they complete a conversion on your target website within 30 days of clicking on a conversion tracking link, Addue will attribute the conversion to that link and record it in your conversion history. If no cookie is found, Addue will attempt a fingerprint match. Fingerprints also expire after 30 days.

Update: It is now also possible to track conversions on Addue without the use of explicit conversion links, allowing you to use your own final URL as the destination URL of your ads. See this tutorial if you’re interested in setting this up.

That wraps it up for this tutorial. In a subsequent tutorial we’ll look at how to combine conversion tracking with traffic splitting so as to set up A/B optimization scenarios on your website.