Tracking Custom Conversions

Conversion events represent actions users take that are critical to your business. When a user completes one of these actions, they've "converted" on a certain business goal. More specifically, a user's action counts as a conversion when they perform an action associated with a custom event or a purchase event that you select when creating a campaign.

Tracking conversion events of either type—custom or purchase—provides valuable insight into how well a campaign is helping you achieve your business goals. For example:

• Tracking a custom event, like app downloads, can tell you whether a campaign motivated a particular action, in this case driving traffic to your app.

• Tracking purchase events that result from a campaign may tell you whether it helped increase revenue.

In many cases, it's valuable to track more than one event at a time. For example, you might want to know how many purchases resulted from a campaign, and also how many times a user clicked on a discount offer from that same campaign. Or, you might want track multiple events so you can see which contributed the most conversions for a given campaign.

For information about adding custom events to your project, see Managing Custom Events.

# Table of contents

# View conversion metrics

To view conversion metrics in Campaign Analytics, navigate to Messaging > Campaigns, and click the name of the campaign you’d like to analyze. On the Campaign Review page, click View campaign performance.

# Conversion metrics overview

On the Campaign Analytics Overview page, you'll see conversion metrics like these. Add or remove metrics using the pinned metrics drop-down.

• Total Custom Conversions counts all custom conversion events associated with a campaign. Multiple events for the same user are counted as multiple conversions. These include only custom conversions—conversions resulting from purchase events are not counted.

• Unique Custom Conversions counts the number of users for whom your campaign recorded at least one custom conversion event. Conversions resulting from purchase events are not counted.

• Total Purchases counts the number of purchases that resulted from a campaign (whether iterable_purchase was selected as a conversion event or not).

• Unique Purchases counts the number of users who made a purchase from the campaign (whether iterable_purchase was selected as a conversion event or not). Users who made more than one purchase are counted only once.

# Conversion metrics by event type

To view a breakdown of all conversion events (custom and purchase), on the Engagement card on the Overview page, hover over Total Conversions.

# Conversion metrics over time

To view how events performed over time, go to the Engagement page and view the Conversions card. This view includes conversions for custom events, and purchase events (using iterable_purchase) that you select during campaign creation.

# Specify conversion events to track

To specify the conversion events you want to track for a campaign:

1. When creating a campaign, choose one or more Conversion Events.

   NOTE

   To track purchase events as conversions, select iterable_purchase as the conversion event name. This isn't a real event name, but a mapping to Iterable purchase events.

   Send purchase events to your Iterable project using the POST /api/commerce/trackPurchase API endpoint. Send custom conversion events using POST /api/events/track.

2. Specify how you want to Attribute conversion events.

   • Attribute only conversion events with explicitly set campaignId field

     

     With this setting, your campaign will only be associated with conversion events that have a matching campaignId.

     Set the campaignId when you create an event by calling POST /api/events/track for custom events or POST /api/commerce/trackPurchase for purchase events.

     NOTE

     If you plan to use a conversion event as an optimization metric in an A/B experiment, you'll also want to set the event's templateId. Iterable can use this field to attribute the event to the right variation, since each variation in an experiment has a unique templateId. See Tracking Purchases and Revenue for an example of using campaignId and templateId.

   • Attribute any conversion events received within this period

     

     With this setting, incoming events of the specified type count as conversions only when they arrive within a given period of time after the campaign is sent. If there are multiple, active attribution periods to which the conversion might apply, Iterable assigns it to the most recently sent campaign.

     This approach may be less accurate than using a specific campaignId for attribution, since it counts attributions for any user who is sent the message, regardless of whether they actually open it or click on a link. The message just neds to be sent, and then somehow trigger the creation of the conversion event.

     If you already have code in place to track the conversion event in question (by calling Iterable's API), attribution windows don't require any extra engineering work.

3. After building the rest of your campaign and launching it, select the campaign and click View Campaign Performance from the Campaign Review page to view performance data in Campaign Analytics.

# Add a conversion metric to an existing campaign

It's possible to add a conversion metric to an existing campaign, as long as it's either a blast campaign that has not yet been sent or a journey campaign that has not yet been activated.

1. Navigate to Messaging > Campaigns and open a campaign.

   NOTE

   To set up a conversion metric for an existing campaign, you must open the campaign from the Messaging > Campaigns screen. It's not possible to make this change while editing a journey tile.

2. On the Edit Template screen (the first screen that appears after when you open the campaign), navigate to Setup.

   

3. Select one or more Conversion events and select an attribution method.