This article outlines the steps to track conversions with several common registration confirmation processes for Feathr customers who are not using/cannot use Google Tag Manager.
Conversion tracking is crucial to understanding the value of your Feathr ad campaigns. It enables you to draw a direct path between your marketing efforts and increased registration, membership, sponsorship, and anything else you sell or promote to your audience.
To define a conversion in any Feathr campaign, you must tell Feathr which Group's growth you would like the campaign to influence. In Feathr, this is called a Goal. Goals are established when building a campaign.
Here is a common conversion tracking scenario: establishing a Registered Attendees Group as the goal of a retargeting campaign.
Read more about building campaigns here.
Using the Feathr Super Pixel to track conversions
In order to track any conversions, your Super Pixel must be placed on any web pages where the conversion activity occurs. For example, if you want to track event registration as a conversion, the Super Pixel must be within the code of your registration workflow, most importantly on the confirmation step. This is because the Super Pixel needs to "see" that activity in order for you to be able to track it.
One way to start is to fill out a registration yourself, to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. As you proceed through each step of your reg form, watch to see if the URL changes as the steps change. That will inform whether you need to place your Super Pixel on every page of your registration flow or only on the final confirmation page (the page after payment has been processed).
If the URL changes for each step:
If you have dynamic URLs within your registration workflow, place the super pixel on every page of the workflow. Why? Because, if possible, it's important to track when a visitor starts a registration but doesn't submit it. You can later target those visitors with a “cart abandonment” campaign that encourages them to come back and complete their registration. Cart abandonment campaigns generally have high conversion rates.
If registration occurs entirely on your domain, and the same global header or footer where you placed the Super Pixel appears on every page of your registration workflow, you are already tracking those steps and you can begin building registration conversion Groups.
If you use a 3rd party vendor to manage registration, get in contact with them and ask to have the Feathr Super Pixel placed on each page of the registration workflow. In order to make placing your Super Pixel easy for your registration vendor, we recommend you review this article.
Example Conversion Group
When your URL changes, and every registrant lands on the same confirmation page, you can make a Group set up like this: URL is "the full url of the confirmation page".
Note: If your URL changes for each registrant (e.g., everyone has a unique confirmation number), you can create a Group using "matches pattern" instead, replacing the unique numbers in an example URL with an asterisk (*). This tells Feathr to track any views of that URL and also to take any unique identifiers into account. For example:
https://www.reg-vendor.com/eventID=5679/registrationform/sessionID=87603/confirm
would be entered as:
https://www.reg-vendor.com/eventID=5679/registrationform/sessionID=*/confirm
Because each reg vendor is different, we encourage you to talk to your vendors and to Feathr Support (via support@feathr.co or in-app chat) if you have questions related to registration tracking.
If your URL does not change:
Because capturing unique URLs is how the Feathr Super Pixel distinguishes page visits, it is ideal to have a registration workflow that displays a different URL for each step. Many registration vendors, however, show the same URL whether you're on the first or last step of registration.
When this happens, the Feathr Super Pixel can't tell the difference between a visitor who has successfully completed registration and one who only looked at the registration page.
In these cases, there are alternative ways to accurately track conversions. One option is to request that the Super Pixel is only placed on the confirmation step. Many 3rd party vendors can place a tracking pixel or static tag that only triggers in the event of a completed registration, even if the URL does not change.
Other Alternatives
Google Tag Manager
Because the Feathr Super Pixel tracks URL loads, using it to track registrations when the URL doesn't change between steps will not be accurate. If your URL does not change and your vendor is unable (or unwilling) to place a static tag, then we recommend Google Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager (GTM), like the Feathr Super Pixel, is a snippet of code that enables you to track activities on your website. GTM can track form submissions, button clicks, and other similar activities that perform an action on your pages without changing the URL. To track registrations that do not have unique URLs for each step, Google Tag Manager tends to be the best solution. Read this article to learn how to implement Google Tag Manager on your own pages.
Simple Redirect
In rare cases where no tracking whatsoever is possible, sometimes a simple redirect to a confirmation landing page can work. To do this, create a simple landing page (even just saying "thank you") is enough, and make sure any registrants are automatically redirected to that page immediately after submitting a registration. Do not link to the landing page from anywhere else. That way, you can be reasonably certain that the only people who have viewed that page arrived there immediately following a registration. Then you can build a Group using that landing page URL as the filter.