In her blog posts, Data: Jump on it! and More Data: Jump On It!, Email Marketing Strategist Kristen Gregory talks about using data to help improve your email marketing campaign. If 
the goal for your email marketing campaign is to persuade a recipient to take an action (common actions include making a purchase by clicking the “Checkout” link), then conversion tracking is exactly what you need. Measuring opens and click-throughs is very important, but conversion tracking is literally where the money is. This blog post will help you get started setting up conversion tracking in your account.
Getting Started
The first thing you need to do is enable conversion tracking by clicking the Conversion Tracking checkbox on the Analytics Page. Once you check the Conversion Tracking checkbox, the page will refresh to provide a user-specific HTML snippet that you will use to set up conversion tracking on your site.
Setting Up The URL Parameters
The URL in the snippet provides parameters for three pieces of information. You will need to modify these parameters for each action that you want to track.
-
type– The type of conversion; purchases ($) or nonpurchases (t). For example
type=$. -
description– The description of the conversion. For example
description=emailcampaign -
money– The amount of revenue gained (if applicable). For examplemoney=299.95
A URL with completed type, description, and money parameters will look something like this:
Note – If you wish to track dynamic description and money values in the application, you can do so programmatically by appending custom values to the conversion tracking URL. Otherwise, you can hardcode a description and money value (as shown above) and have a set description and money value for each conversion completed.
Pasting The URL On Your Pages
Once you have encoded all of the information that you want to track into the URL, you can take the image tag and paste it anywhere in the HTML for the pages that are shown once a conversion is completed (for example, a thank-you page or a subscription confirmation page). The image tag will take care of the rest and pass all of the information that you have encoded in the URL back to the application. From here, you can view the message report for an individual message to see exactly how many conversions resulted from that message.
Update
For more information on dynamically adding values to the conversion tracking URL, check out this post.
John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
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I have a question, how does the conversion tracking code know that its coming from Bronto. We have the tracking code on our thank you page. So if the an order is tracked, how does bronto know that the source was from an email as opposed to another source?
Jake,
Great question! We are able to determine that the source is from email by means of a cookie that is set in the browser when a contact makes a conversion via an email sent from our system. This cookie contains identifying information that lets our report tracking system know that the conversion resulted from a specific email sent via our system and not some other source. So for example, when one of your contacts clicks a link in an email that you sent to them via Bronto, a cookie is set in their browser identifying the source message and delivery time. The conversion tracking URL will only pass conversion data back to Bronto for contacts who have this cookie in their browser at the time they complete a conversion. Hence, when you take a look at your conversion metrics in Bronto, you are only seeing the conversions that directly resulted from messages sent via Bronto. Hope this helps and feel free to ask more questions if you have any!
Question: Regarding with the three parameters, Should I really input each description and price of each item that I need to track? But we always have many items featured in our email campaign, should we always define it in the parameters? Do we need to change the url snippet every time we have another email campaign and another items featured?
Just a follow up. Is there an easy way of installing the tracking code without applying extensive coding. By the way we are using Yahoo store, will there be an easy way to apply it in our site.
Peace,
The installation method described in this post is the only way to install conversion tracking on your site. In regards to your first question, you will need to have one
imgtag with a completed URL for each conversion you want to track. Thisimgtag is embedded on your site and is tied to a specific conversion, not necessarily a specific product. The goal of conversion tracking in Bronto is to track conversions resulting from email, and not individual conversion rates for each of your products. If you really wanted to, you could create unique conversion tracking URLs for each product you want to track (either by hand or programmatically), but this is very much a custom solution that would need to be created on your end. Hope this helps and let us know if you need any additional support!We have done putting bronto tracking code but it doesn’t track the revenue in the report. We assumed that when we will leave the parameters for money as empty, it will get the revenue dynamically. Could you explain to us how to correct it?
Peace,
Just leaving the money parameter empty is not enough. You have two options you can choose to populate the money parameter. First, you can hard code a value for the money parameter (i.e.
money=299.95). I am assuming, however, that this is not the option you want to use. The second option is to dynamically populate the value for the money parameter programmatically. At the bottom of this post under “Update”, I linked to a follow up post that explains how to dynamically add values to the conversion tracking URL. The example given in that post uses javascript to accomplish this task, but you can use another language if you choose. If you have already attempted to update the money parameter programmatically and are still having issues, I would contact our customer service team. They will be able to help debug any problems that may be occurring in the code you are using. You can reach customer support at (919) 595-2500. Hope this helps!