Brontoversity » conversions

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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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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Make Sure That The Message Fits: Test With A/B Content Splits

John Gunther — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:37:50 +0000

The brilliant thing about email is it’s ability to take the “guess work” out of marketing. If you want to see if people are opening your messages, you check the open rate. If you want to know exactly how much money your campaign is bringing in, you check the conversion rates. Even something as seemingly abstract as your message’s content can be tested, and this is where A/B Content Splits can really pay dividends.

So What Are A/B Content Splits?

With A/B Content Splits, you can quickly compare multiple versions of a message’s content against each other in a way that lets your contacts choose the best performing option.

Setting Up A/B Content Splits

Compose two or more version of the same message and make minor changes to the areas of the message content you want to test.
Select the message you want to perform the A/B Content Split on.
Click Send A/B Split from the Message Overview Page.
Choose Full Message Content from the Split Content drop-down box.
Choose the type of split you want to perform and then designate split groups.
- A/B Winner – A/B-Winner splits involve testing messages with two or more groups to see which is most effective. After a set period of time, a winner is chosen based off of preselected criteria, such as highest open rate or highest number of clicks. After the winner is selected, the winning message is sent to the remainder of your targeted contacts.
- Champion/Challenger – Champion/Challenger is quite similar to A/B-Winner, the difference being that you don’t have a winner group. In this type of test you have an established way of doing something, called the Champion, and you want to test if it is still the best by introducing a Challenger. An example of this is testing a new template design or header image compared to your current standard. In creating a Champion/Challenger split, it is common to send most of your contacts the champion while setting aside a smaller portion for the challenger. Once the test is run, there is no winner group who receives a message, but you do have a good idea about whether or not your champion is as good as you thought it was.
Click Next.
The message you choose in step 2 will automatically be used for split group A. You will need to choose the alternate versions of the message you created using the message selector for the other split groups.
From here, you need to specify the sender options, verify the selections you have made, and then schedule the actual delivery.
Later on, you can view a report for that delivery that will show you which version of the message garnered the most favorable reception.

Important Things To Consider

With A/B Content Splits, remember not to get pulled into the trap of using two drastically different versions of a message. Rather, use this type of test to examine how simple design tweaks, such as order and positioning of links and images, affects the amount of clicks and conversions your message receives. You may be surprised to see how simple changes, like moving your call to action to the area of the message above the fold, will help drive clicks and conversions in your message.

Have you successfully implemented the A/B content split feature in Bronto? Please share your comments with us 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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