Brontoversity » conversion tracking

Tracking Non-Commerce Goals

Adam Covati — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:14:06 +0000

I recently covered a couple different ways to track conversions. That’s all fine and well if you want to track purchases, but many times our goals aren’t always as simple as that. That doesn’t mean it can’t be tracked with conversion tracking, and it doesn’t mean you can’t prove the value of email.

Just because you aren’t doing e-commerce doesn’t mean you can’t track your goals and it definitely doesn’t mean you aren’t making money. You can track pretty much anything that happens on your website. The most common examples are a sign up, whitepaper download, or really any event where people give you information.

Once you know what you want to track, it just comes down to editing the thank you or confirmation page. What we are looking for is a webpage that is shown when you are doing what you want to do. That’s the page where we’ll put in the conversion tracking code.

If you need a refresher, check out Setting Up Conversion Tracking Within Bronto. In this case we’ll probably be setting the type to t and then setting a description. Once it’s setup, you will start to see conversions tracked in your next email.

It’s that simple and you’ve just started down the path of proving the value of your emails! If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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Tis The Conversion Season

Adam Covati — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:11:17 +0000

The holiday season is already upon us, and for many of us, that means we are already watching the sales rolling in. Of course, if you don’t know exactly how much of those sales you are driving with your email marketing, then you are you are missing out – big time.

Knowing the impact your email marketing has on the bottom line is huge. It can help you to justify more money, more time, or more thought on what is most likely a crucial part of your marketing mix. So how can you do that? One word gets you there – Conversions.

Within Bronto you can quickly and easily track conversions, and today I’d like to talk about strategies for getting the most out of tracking multiple purchases on your site. Keep in mind that conversion tracking within email marketing can be powerful, but it is usually there for segmentation purposes. Conversion tracking allows for a great way to track email’s value add or engage in remarketing, but it’s not going to replace the reporting you get from your ecommerce system.

With that being said, when you are implementing conversion tracking, you should consider your needs first. For the details on how to implement the actual tracking code, see our recent blog post on Setting Up Conversion Tracking Within Bronto.

Show me the money

If you are looking primarily to understand the total amount of money that is driven in, then I’d suggest you go with ‘Purchase Total’ tracking. In this method you will be tracking just one thing, purchase total. In fact, I would recommend just using “purchase total” as the actual description.

This will allow you to have a simple report that quickly and easily displays the value you are realizing from your email marketing. You will be able to segment your contacts on purchase amounts as well. Are you excited about the prospects of a High Value Customers yet?

A Segmenter’s Dream

If you have loftier goals of segmenting and targeting buyers based on their behavior, I would suggest going with a more granular approach. You can actually track multiple conversions on one page, and I would suggest doing one for each department they purchase within. You could track at the product level, but that can quickly become unwieldy, and frankly, almost impossible to segment on.

The departmental method will require that your ecommerce system (or an add-on created by your team) be able to break purchases down by department. However, once you have conversions tracked by department (with their corresponding spend by department), you will be able to segment you contacts by department they have purchased from. Now you’ve just opened a door to more relevant emails!

As you can see, there is no single set way to track conversions. You will need to put some thought into what you want to do with the resulting data. But don’t be too concerned, if you find that you aren’t getting the data you need, you can always change your conversion tracking.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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Dynamically Adding Values To Conversion Tracking URLs

John Gunther — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:30:44 +0000

In recent weeks, I have been getting a lot of questions about the post I wrote on the basics of setting up conversion tracking. Because this post dealt only with the basics of setting up conversion tracking, we only showed you how to set up the conversion tracking URL using hard-coded values for the money and description parameters. Using hard-coded values is perfectly fine, but it is a very limited solution.

The Problem With Hard-Coded Values

If you are tracking only a single type of conversion, such as whether or not someone downloaded a whitepaper, then using hard-coded values in your conversion tracking URL will probably work fine. However, if you are tracking monetary conversions in which your customers could be purchasing a wide range of products with varying prices, then hard-coding the values into the conversion tracking URL becomes a nightmare. Technically, you could create a unique conversion tracking URL for each conversion you want to track. However, what if you have five hundred different products, each with a different price, that customers could purchase any combination of?

Code To The Rescue!

A more robust solution is to dynamically populate the conversion tracking URL parameter values. In other words, you populate the conversion tracking URL based on the values that are chosen by each customer once they have arrived at the page on your site where the conversion tracking URL is embedded. There are a number of different ways to accomplish this task, each of which requires some development experience. If you need an example of what I am talking about, Jake Rutter has written an excellent tutorial for populating the conversion tracking URL parameter values using Javascript titled How to setup Bronto Tracking Pixels with JavaScript.

In the next few weeks, Adam Covati (Project Manager at Bronto) will be writing a post that expands on this subject and explains the different types of data you can track using Bronto’s conversion tracking feature. Stay tuned and let us know if you have any questions in the mean time!

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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Tracking The Source Of A Conversion

John Gunther — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:28:28 +0000

This post is in response to a comment I recently received on my post How Much Are Your Emails Worth? Setting Up Conversion Tracking. I responded to the comment, but have since decided to make a post of the question posed to me, in case there are any readers out there who are curious or just want me to further expand upon the subject. The comment reads:

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. If an order is tracked, how does Bronto know that the source was from an email as opposed to another source?

Cookies Are The Key

You may not be able to eat these cookies, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love them just the same! Cookies are what allow us to determine that the source of the conversion is from an email sent from Bronto. Cookies contain 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. In more technical terms:

In computing, a cookie (also tracking cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie) is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by a web browser. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information such as user preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or other data used by websites.
It is sent as an HTTP header by a web server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. A cookie can be used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and remembering specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts.
Source: Wikipedia

A Simple Bronto Example

So with Bronto conversion tracking, when one of your contact clicks on a link within a Bronto email, a cookie is set in their browser. When that contact loads up a page with the conversion tracking URL embedded in it, Bronto logs the conversion.

If some one loads up a page with the conversion tracking URL embedded in it, but with no cookie set, then Bronto doesn’t log anything. It’s pretty simple: no cookie, no email conversion. Hence, when you take a look at your conversion metrics in Bronto, you are only seeing the conversions that resulted from messages sent via Bronto.

I hope this post has provided the necessary insight to understand how we determine the source of conversion tracking URLs sent via Bronto. Should you have any additional questions, feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below!

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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Let Their Actions Be Your Guide

John Gunther — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:52:53 +0000

Although not the most likely source for marketing insight, Mr. Joe Dirt put it brilliantly when he said “Well that might be your problem, it’s not what you like, it’s the consumer.” So what’s the easiest way to find out what your customers want or like? How about having them tell you want they want through their actions.

For most marketers, this is no easy task. But alas, you are an email marketer, and even better, you are an email marketer using Bronto! Not only can you send relevant/timely messages in response to your customer’s actions, but you can do so automatically using behaviorally targeted automated message rules. Here’s how:

Setting Up Your Behaviorally Targeted Automated Message Rule

Go to Messages->Automated Message Rules.
Click the Create New Automated Message Rule link.

You will be brought to Step 1 of the create an automated message rule wizard. This four step wizard is designed to make creating automated message rules easy. Choose a name for your automated message rule.
Click the radio button next to the Behaviorally Targeted automated message rule type.
Specify the Type Settings for the automated message rule. You will need to choose the related message that the automated message rule will watch for. You will also need to choose the action or behavior that the automated message will look for in the related message. So for example, you could send a follow-up message to contacts who opened and clicked links contained in an email you sent to them regarding your Summer 2009 Sale.
Click Next.
You will be brought to Step 2 in the wizard. From here, you can pick the message that will be sent via the automated message rule in response to the action or behavior you choose to look for. You will also need to specify all the sending options for the automated message rule. These are similar to the sender options you specify when scheduling a regular delivery.
You can now click Advanced to continue on to Step 3 in the wizard, or click Verify Settings to bypass Step 3 and continue directly to Step 4 in the wizard. If you click Advanced, you can specify some of the advanced settings associated with automated message rules. After you are done on Step 3, you can click Verify Settings to continue to Step 4 in the wizard.
Once you are on Step 4, you can either click Save As Draft, which will save, but not activate the automated message rule (i.e. no messages will be sent via the automated message rule until you activate it), or click Save And Activate, which will save and activate the automated message rule.

So there you have it. By utilizing the power of a behaviorally targeted automated message rule, you can let your customer’s actions drive your email marketing efforts in an unobtrusive manner. Now all you have to do is sit back and let the automated message rule work it’s magic.

Have you used behaviorally targeted automated message rules in Bronto? If so, we’d love to hear about it in our comments section below.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto

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How Much Are Your Emails Worth? Setting Up Conversion Tracking

John Gunther — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:50:08 +0000

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 example money=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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More Conversion Info For Your Contacts

Adam Covati — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:21:41 +0000

Want to prove ROI on your email marketing program? Who doesn’t? Well conversion tracking is the way to go, and we’ve just made it even more powerful.

You may not have noticed, but we have recently added some additional fields to the contact view in the application. If you are tracking conversions within Bronto you will now be able to see the total number of conversions as well as total conversion value for each contact.

We have also recently added this information to the detailed contact overview. This means that if you look up a specific contact you can see what they were sent, whether or not they opened or click, as well as any conversions they made.

If you aren’t tracking conversions, I highly recommend it. It’s very easy to add to your website and provides you with detailed information about how email marketing is affecting your sales.

Tis The Conversion Season The holiday season is already upon us, and for many...
Dynamically Adding Values To Conversion Tracking URLs In recent weeks, I have been getting a lot of...