What is conversion tracking?
Do you want to know the effectiveness of your campaigns? Bet you do, and you probably already analyze the open and click rates. But what happens after the click in your campaign? Imagine if you could get feedback in Symplify as purchases are made on your website following a clicked link! Conversion tracking does exactly that!
Benefits
When you have access to conversion data in your reports, you can make smarter decisions, particularly about what sendouts and segments you invest in. Given better data, you can better measure your overall return on investment (ROI) for your communication.
This is an add-on feature, please reach out to your Symplify Success manager to learn more.
Setting up conversion tracking
To set up Conversion tracking you simply add a script (provided by Symplify) on your website. The tracking is then added to all your links in your send-outs which provides the script with the information it needs to return any data to Symplify.
Introduction
The below instructions refer to [server] in the URL. This should be replaced by the server your account is located. Log into your Symplify account and open the main menu, at the bottom of the menu you'll find your account information:
- Server 1: eu-proxy-1.symplifymail.com
- Server 2: eu-proxy-2.symplifymail.com
- Server 3: eu-proxy-3.symplifymail.com
- Server 5: nam-proxy.symplifymail.com
Adding the script
Step 1
Copy and paste this snippet into the <head> of your website.
You should use the following login URL: https://[server]/carma (read more above).
<script type="text/javascript">
function initCarmaRoi(){
carma.roi.init("https://[server]/mail", true);
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://carma-scripts-cf.s3.amazonaws.com/roi.js"></script>
Step 2
Call the function that initializes the conversion functionality when your page has loaded. This can be done by adding the following snippet to your page’s <body> tag:
onload="initCarmaRoi()"
The result should look similar to
<body onload="initCarmaRoi()">
Step 3
When a conversion is made, call carma.roi.register(amount)
Make sure you have called carma.roi.init before calling carma.roi.register.
The amount parameter is optional.
If you do not specify an amount parameter, you will not see the total order value and value per conversions on emails in your Symplify report.
If you are using multiple currencies on your website, make sure that the correct currency is sent to Symplify. Symplify is not currency-specific and will only show the number you send in amount.
<script type="text/javascript"> function onCheckout(amount){ carma.roi.register(amount); } </script>
Example flow
With this setup a link including the tracking parameter will add the cookie which follows the visitor on each page and returns the conversion amount on checkout.
The conversion can be viewed on the contact in Symplify and on the sendout where the original click was made.
Advanced setup
By default, the tracking cookie will be removed when the recipient closes their browser. If you want to specify how long you consider a purchase to be a conversion from the link in your email, pass the third parameter to carma.roi.init.
Valid formats
An absolute date
carma.roi.init("https://[server]/mail", true, new Date(2012, 0, 1));
A UTC formatted date string
carma.roi.init("https://[server]/mail", true, "Sun, 1 Jan 2012 12:00:00 GMT");
A time frame, in hours
carma.roi.init("https://[server]/mail", true, 120);
How to get it rolling
When you have done the required adjustments on your website you will get the statistics for your conversions in Symplify after you have done the following steps.
Once the feature is activated on your account your send-outs will get the tracking parameter selectable. It will be enabled by default but you can disable it if you for some reason don't want to use it for a specific send out.
When enabled, all links in your send-outs will be followed by the parameter and value c_rid=!!roiid!!, which will generate the unique tracking parameter for each recipient per link.
Manually adding conversion tracking to links
If you are coding your own HTML emails, or for any reason do not wish to add the tracking parameter to all links, you can specify the required parameter by adding c_rid=!!roiid!! to your link URL.
<a href=”https://www.example.com/page.html?c_rid=!!roiid!!”>Go to landing page</a>
Asynchronous JS Loading
We recommend using asynchronous JS loading mode for step 1 in the header. As long as it is loaded before step 2. This will reduce the chances of your site being slowed down in case the script becomes unavailable.
Testing
Before setting up everything on your website you can use the following test example to see how this works.
- Link to the following pages from your email
https://[server]/conversion/shop.htm - Send an email to yourself but remember to use a normal list and not a test list since you don’t get statistics on test emails (make sure the Symplify ROI tracking is activated).
- Click the link in the email
- Buy something in the test shop (free of charge of course ;) )
- Look at the statistics of your email and view the conversions you made in your email.