Setting Up Conversion Tracking

Conversion pixels count the number of users that completed a particular action on your website and attribute that conversion information back to the tactic.

Setting up conversion tracking involves two processes:

  1. Creating a conversion pixel and placing it on your website. See Creating Conversion Pixels and Getting Audience and Conversion Pixel Tags.

  2. Adding conversions to your tactics. SeeConversion Tracking (Tactic Editor).

After you add the conversion tag code to your webpage, users that land on this page after being served impressions or clicking an ad are counted as conversions. If you associated a revenue amount to your conversion pixel, that revenue value will be counted each time someone reaches the page.

Placing Conversion Tags in Emails

We do not recommend placing conversion tags in email. Desktop email clients do not generally support cookies, which prevents the tag from functioning. Even if the client does support cookies, they will not share the same cookie pool as the user’s web browser, making collecting the cookie ID useless since no impressions can be bought against it.

Webmail clients may support cookies, but Gmail specifically uses a proxy server to cache images and strip cookies. Accordingly, the vast majority of users will not be receiving the email in a client where conversion tags can work.

If you wish to use conversion tags in email, select the HTML Image tag type when you're getting the pixel tag, then modify the tag to include "https:" before the "//" in the image URL.

For example, if the tag code supplied is: 

<img src="//pixel-a.basis.net/iap/9f020b3f5eee11a3" width="1" height="1" style="position: absolute; left: -150px;" />

It should be modified to: 

<img src="https://pixel-a.basis.net/iap/9f020b3f5eee11a3" width="1" height="1" style="position: absolute; left: -150px;" />

This is done to cause the email client to fetch the image file from the right place. In normal circumstances, because DSP conversion tags use what it called a protocol-relative URL, the browser automatically loads it over HTTP or HTTPS as appropriate for the context of the current page. In an email client, the HTML of the message is not being downloaded from a web server, so there is no context available to determine whether to include "http" or "https" before the "//" in the image URL.

Older versions of Outlook specifically are known to contain a bug that causes Outlook to assume that the URL should be loaded using the “file://” protocol. This protocol refers to the local computer, and this causes a pop-up dialog to display and triggers a long delay while Outlook attempts to fetch a non-existent file. To avoid this, add “https:” before “//” in the image URL as described above.

When you save your changes to the tactic, your tactic is ready to track the conversion pixel you placed on your web page.