Site and ROI tracking

Learn how to set up site and ROI tracking on your site.

Overview

By setting up site and ROI tracking for your account, you can do three things:

• track the journey of contacts who go on to access your website via links in your campaigns
• track ROI values for those same customers if you're an e-commerce business
• split test campaigns using ROI metrics

Site tracking enriches your data and your understanding of your contacts' engagement with your site, whilst ROI tracking gives you a greater appreciation of your campaigns' ROI conversion rates. 

Before you can begin to use site and ROI tracking, you must first set it up. This involves adding lines of JavaScript code to your web pages. However, don't worry - we provide this code for you, so just carry out the following steps to add and enable it.

You're also able to set up third-party tracking for all of your campaigns from this area of the app, if you wish.

Set up site and ROI tracking

Please note:

• Our site and ROI tracking script can't be applied via Google Tag Manager. It needs to be added directly to your site as outlined below.
• For Magento users, ROI tracking must be set up using the Magento connector and not in Dotdigital. Learn how in the Magento 1 and Magento 2 tracking articles.

1. Select Campaigns > Advanced features, and then select the Site & ROI tracking tab to display the following screen.
   
   
   
2. The site tracking code is displayed at the top of this screen. Copy this code and add it before the closing </body> tag on every page of your website that you would like to track. This will enable you to track which pages your contacts go to after clicking a link in your email. 
   
   This site tracking information is then provided within the analytics area against the relevant campaign.
3. If it's the case that you'll require tracking across different subdomains (for instance, www.company.com and shop.company.com) then enter the name of your domain (without the subdomain) into the Domain to track box under the Sub domains section.
4. Click on the Generate button and the JavaScript above will generate the correct code to be copied and added to your web page.
5. The ROI tracking code is displayed lower down the screen. It enables you to track purchases made by a contact arriving at your website from a link in your campaign. 
   
   This code is set out with example markers of "product", "Product name" and "CheckOutAmount" which should be replaced with the markers you’re planning to track.
   
   In the example given, this code would need to be added to your post-purchase confirmation page or its equivalent and it needs to be appended underneath the last line of the site tracking code of that page. This will enable you to track a list of the products purchased and the total checkout amount.
   
   Any purchases made are tracked and this information is shown in the analytics area against the relevant campaign.

   
   Please note

   • Site tracking code should be added to every page that you wish to track.
   • ROI tracking code only needs to be added to your post-purchase confirmation page.
   
   However, you need to make sure you append the ROI tracking code to the site tracking code, and not just have the ROI tracking code by itself. Without the site tracking code, your post-purchase confirmation page won't get tracked, meaning the ROI information won't get retrieved.
6. As explained on the screen, there is an optional third parameter that can be set on your pages. By default, multiple values per ROI marker are recorded, so if a user clicked to go back in their browser, more than one value might be stored as a consequence. To store only the latest value you must add and set this parameter to 'true'. An example of the notation required is provided for you to edit, copy and paste.

ROI tracking session length

An ROI tracking session lasts for one hour.

Setting up ROI split testing markers 

Once you have ROI tracking set up you can enable ROI split testing, which will allow you to measure winning split test campaigns on ROI data, not just the amount of clicks and opens.

Firstly, you must set up your ROI split testing markers. ROI markers are the parameter names discussed above in step 5, which will be the corresponding names you use for such fields in your own system.

Go to the bottom of the page and click on Add new to add your ROI marker's details.

A box will appear for you to set the name of the marker and select its data type from the dropdown options - either text, number, date or 'yes/no' (known as a Boolean value).

Click Save to commit the ROI marker.

It will then be listed in this section, available for editing or deletion. If you delete markers here, it will mean you can no longer use them for split testing purposes but they will still be tracked if you call them on your site.

Adding at least one ROI marker will ensure the ROI metric option becomes available to select under 'Set your split testing options' when reaching step 4 ('Contacts') of the campaign creation process. Selecting the ROI radio button will produce a dropdown of ROI marker options which is populated by the ROI markers you've created here. 

Viewing information about ROI in campaign reports

On the email report overview page, ROI data is displayed in the ROI headline tile. This headline tile displays the following data, depending on the results of your ROI reports:

• 'No markers have been tracked for this campaign': This notice is displayed if either you haven't included ROI tracking on your webpages, or your campaign has not collected any ROI tracking data.
• The number of markers that were tracked: Mouse over the headline tile and click 'View full report' to find out which markers were tracked.
• The total checkout amount of your ROI tracking: If you want the ROI headline tile to report this amount, you need to set up your ROI tracking with the CheckOutAmount marker, which is in the example code under the 'ROI tracking' section.

You may also find the following articles useful:

• Using split testing to test multiple subject lines, friendly from names, creative and from addresses
• Configuring and sending a campaign that's using split testing

Setting up third-party tracking

At the foot of the 'Site & ROI tracking' tab, you can set up third-party tracking - such as for Return Path or 250ok - for all of your campaigns. 

Insert your third-party tracking code into the field and click Save. The code will get added before the closing </body> tag for all campaigns sent from the account.

Important

• Be very careful to avoid any mistakes or typos when entering this, as we'll apply the tracking code exactly as it's provided. If mistakes are present, your third-party tracking won't work correctly.
• After saving, you'll need to save a campaign at least once for the tracking code to then be applied to it.

When the code has been configured properly, the results should look similar to the following example:

You can access this view by clicking View full report link that's available in the Email report.

Cookie management for Site and ROI tracking

Our Site and ROI tracking features use non-essential cookies to work. To be GDPR compliant, you must get consent from your users if your site uses any non-essential cookies. You can do this with a cookie management solution.

To learn more about essential and non-essential cookies and when and how to use cookie management, check out the article Make sure you're cookie compliant.