Passing revenue and order ID values with conversion events

January 3, 2014

[Editor’s Note: To kick off the new year, Scott Danielson, SharpSpring Ads’s fearless Customer Success Manager, will be publishing a series of posts on campaign optimization aimed at helping you achieve true victory with your campaigns.  If you have suggestions for topics we should cover, send us a line at ads@sharpspring.com.  Enjoy the first installment focused on setting up tracking!]
You’re all tracking your conversions in SharpSpring Ads, right? If not, set that up immediately! Tracking conversions is the best way to track how well your campaigns are performing and determine your overall ROI.
You can setup a conversion goal in just a few minutes, and we allow you to assign a revenue value for each conversion. For example, if you make $10 on every sale, you can attribute $10 to each conversion in SharpSpring Ads.
That might be good enough for you, but what if your sales vary in price? What if you have an online store that holds a variety of items with different costs? Can you track those values as well?
Absolutely! You can pass through the revenue value and an order ID/customer email address to the conversion manager in your account. In fact, you can do this right through the tracking tag that’s already installed on your website. Here’s how it works:
First, look for the lines of code in your tracking tag that look like this:
// _pa.orderId = "myOrderId"; // OPTIONAL: attach unique conversion identifier to conversions
// _pa.revenue = "19.99"; // OPTIONAL: attach dynamic purchase values to conversions

If you want to include an order ID or other identifier for the order (like a customer email), remove the two // before _pa.orderId. Then, change the “myOrderId” to the value or variable your website uses for that information. This is going to vary from site to site, and it might be something you need to ask your web developer about. This information should already be available on your conversion page. For example, if your shopping cart software uses a variable labeled {order_id}, then you would change that line to read _pa.orderId=”{order_id}”.
The same goes for the revenue value. Remove the // at the beginning of that line, then change the default “19.99” to whichever variable on your site holds the order total.
That’s all you need to do! Assuming you have everything setup correctly, your Conversion Manager will start showing the information that you’re passing through from your sales for new conversions.
Feel free to take a look at this page for more information.
You’re welcome to email ads@sharpspring.com if you have any questions about setting up your conversion goals in this way. Please keep in mind that because this is more of an advanced feature that requires custom coding, we can only offer very limited support on this topic. Your web host/developer is probably the best resource to set this up for you, but we’ll do what we can to help!
Happy retargeting!

Scott Danielson

Scott Danielson

Scott is the Customer Success Manager at Perfect Audience. He holds a degree from Illinois State University and has over 13 years experience working in the customer service/tech support field.
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