The many ways to calculate conversions

Conversions tracking is all about reporting on performance of your communications and marketing. If you're not tracking conversions, you're basically spraying and praying. Below we'll cover some common conversion mechanisms, and their pros and cons.

Conversion tracking is a necessary pre-requisite for quality attribution. Without good conversion tracking, you can't attribute those conversions to a channel or message. See Attribution Models for more information on what happens after a conversion.

For the purposes of this document, we're going to talk about monetary transactions (purchases, donations, etc), but the same concepts would apply to other conversion types (lead generation, signup forms, petitions, etc).

Native conversion tracking

Some integrated platforms natively track the conversion performance of a message. For example, an integrated email and transaction processor can track an individual from the email they click on all the way through to a completed transaction. Usually this is done with cookies, sometimes with URL parameters, sometimes with javascript. But fundamentally the platform is in charge of the process from end to end.

This is very convenient if you're using the same platform for everything: it's what allows a CRM to present revenue figures next to opens and clicks as part of your comprehensive email metrics.

But it doesn't map well to social media tracking, or to any scenario where there are multiple different messaging and transaction platforms in the mix. Did you drive contributions to ActBlue donation pages from NGP emails and Google Ads? Native tracking will be at a loss.

Furthermore, native conversion tracking is at best an estimate. Refreshing the thank you page, restarting your browser, temporarily losing internet access, not allowing or clearing cookies, not allowing javascript, and more can all lead to transactions that don't get tracked, or transactions that get tracked twice.

Tag & Pixel conversion tracking

Google (Tag manager) and Facebook (Pixel tracking) are a few of many popular tools that exist to track conversions in a multi-channel environment. They work by placing a chunk of code (a "pixel"), onto the page your constituent reaches after s/he makes a transaction. The tool will then store information about that conversion, which you can gather reporting on.

If the messaging is going out of the same platform you're tracking on, for example if you're posting a Facebook Ad and using the Facebook pixel, you can see direct conversion performance right next to the ad performance -- making it easy to calculate Return-On-Investment (ROI).

Tag & Pixel is a very common and very effective means of calculating performance. However, it suffers from several problems that afflict a growing percentage of interactions:

1. It's at best an estimate — Once again, refreshing the thank you page, restarting your browser, temporarily losing internet access, not allowing or clearing cookies, not allowing javascript, and more can all lead to transactions that don't get tracked, or transactions that get tracked twice.
2. 3rd party privacy — More and more people are becoming sensitive to ubiquitous tracking on the web, and are disabling third party trackers, or explicitly disabling Google and Facebook tracking. Once only a marginal issue, this has had a growing effect on T&P tracking in the 2020s, particularly after updates to Apple's iOS 14.5 hobbled the ability of advertisers to track advertising conversions for a huge swath of end users.
3. Only on the web — Many groups organize offline, through direct mail, and more often through newer content and payment platforms (Over The Top TV, Amazon payments, Apple Pay, etc). T&P management is typically difficult or impossible on these channels. This makes it difficult to calculate cross-channel performance, as the tracking mechanism varies by platform and by channel.
4. It's labor-intensive — You incur some institutional "code debt" to add in tag and pixel codes to your various web properties, and to keep it up to date as time passes. If you have full control over every part of your web presence, it's straightforward and well documented to add in tags and pixel code. However, many companies and organizations use a variety of different platforms, and a variety of different consultants to manage their communications. Some platforms don't allow for custom javascript, some platforms are locked out because of permissions, etc. And any change to any platform will require someone moderately technical to go update the T&P code ... which can then quickly fall out of date once again.
5. It keeps changing — Similar to (4), the major T&P trackers out there are constantly tweaking and updating their interfaces and code to adapt to the web's evolutions. For example, Facebook keeps changing the name of their pixel conversion tracking -- as of this writing it's the Website purchase data, but was previously combinations of the website conversion and website purchase conversion data.

For all these reasons, Frakture recommends source code based conversion tracking.

Source Code based conversion tracking