Google / Bing Offline Conversion Tracking
- Jonathan Tew
Introduction
The web browser landscape has been shifting over the past few years as a war has been waged between the major tech companies against each other. Part of this war has been against third party tracking cookies that were commonly by advertising companies to reliably track conversions and ad performance. A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic so we’re not going to rehash the rational of the various parties in this article. It is what it is.
Solution
The common solution within the advertising industry has been to move away from cookies and shift toward “click identifiers” that the website owner can collect and then provide back to the marketing platform along with the conversion data. While the plumbing to do this is more complex than cookies were, it’s actually far more reliable and accurate.
When you click through an add on Google for your site it will have a “glcid” parameter on the URL. Bing does something similar with a “msclkid” parameter.
Enable Bing Auto Tagging
Make sure that you have enabled Bing Auto Tagging so that your landing page will contain the msclkid parameters.
Collecting the Click Identifiers
If you’re doing everything in an UltraCart StoreFront, we’re automatically collecting all the identifiers for you. If you’re using a checkout only StoreFront or REST API based checkout then you will want to deploy UltraCart Analytics to your site. The UltraCart Analytics engine does all the heavy lifting and plumbing of this data for you.
If you fail to deploy the Analytics tracking script to the landing pages that are receiving traffic from Google / Bind, UltraCart will be unable to collect the click identifiers.
Where do the Click Identifiers go?
The identifiers are stored on the order as properties. These properties are available within our REST API, Webhooks, and Data Warehouse solutions if you want to get at the raw values.
UltraCart goes a step further though to make it easy to feed this information back to Google and Bing. If you navigate to your StoreFront → File Manage → /feeds/ you will see a set of automatically generated files similar to what is shown below:
The files are updated hourly by the system and contain the last 10 days of conversions. They are produced in two major variants: subtotal and total. You first want to decide which value you want to feed back to the marketing platform as the revenue you collected. Most merchants will use subtotal. For Google there are a lot of additional secondary variants for how Google should do attribution of the revenue based upon multiple ads being involved in the marketing that lead to the sale. More details on the Google attribution models is available here.
If these files do not exist in your feeds directory, make sure you have setup UltraCart Analytics on your site, had at least 1 sale from the ad platform, and waited at least one hour after that sale for the file to generate.
Registering the File with Google
Google tends to change things on a regular basis so we aren’t going to document their configuration process step by step. Instead please visit the following document and find the section labeled “Upload your conversions on a schedule”
Registering the File with Bing
The Bing documentation on importing conversion is located here.
What about Facebook?
Facebook does a similar click parameter tracking scheme, but the data is reported back to Facebook using the Conversion API. Please visit this documentation for information on how to setup the Facebook Conversion API.
What about XYZ platform?
If there is another marketing platform that you’re using which has:
Predictable click identifier parameters
Can scrape an automated feed of conversion data from a URL
Bring it to our attention and we will look into adding support for the platform as well.
Troubleshoot FAQ
Q) Why are feed files not appearing?
A) The system does not produce a feed file until there is an order that contains the click identifiers. You are most likely missing the deployment of the tracking script to your external site.
Q) Why are click identifiers not being collected?
A) Do you have the analytics collection script deployed out to your external site? If not, see deploying UltraCart Analytics.
Q) How can I troubleshoot collection issues further?
A) Turn on StoreFront Recordings and make sure you have the tracking script deployed. If you can see the gclid, etc. parameter appearing the StoreFront Recordings then you have everything functioning properly. Below is a StoreFornt Recording filter finding sessions which have the gclid parameter on a page.
A) On your external site open the developer tools, click on the Network tab, click on the JS filter, and then search for collect-g.ms as shown below.