E-Commerce Conversion Funnel Tracking

How to Understand Each Paying Customer Journey and Find Out What Drives 99% of Revenue

Key Points

  • Majority of e-commerce businesses don't know what sources produce revenue and ROI exactly. With improved conversion funnel tracking it is possible to map each customer's journey and attribute 99% of won deals to the original marketing sources.
  • Not every lead has the same chance of becoming a paying customer. Attributing sales to leads and leads to marketing sources allows to determine what marketing activity actually drives sales and increase RoAS up to 7x.
  • Customers can be tracked even in multiple-step e-commerce funnels by utilising first-party tracking and mapping customer journey from the first ad click and landing page visit to marketing website and through to the closed won CRM deal.

Why E-Commerce Conversion Funnels Are Special

E-commerce funnels used to be amongst the simplest to track. New developments in e-commerce marketing made tracking and understanding customer journeys a lot harder for many types of funnels.

Often, the lead may be first captured on a domain separate from the main store website. Or an external service can be used to capture the customer's email on the main website. Then, once a purchase eventually happens, neither the service used to run the store or traditional analytics services could attribute it to the source correctly as neither has ability to track the entire funnel.

As a result, 30-50% of purchases don't have correct source in analytics, as well as missing from the ad platforms' reports.

Many marketers see this as a natural technology limitation. It doesn't have to be this way. E-commerce sales can be tracked throughout the entire funnel: from the first interaction to the revenue.

E-Commerce Conversion Funnel Stages

Full life-cycle of a customer consists of the following steps:

  1. First website visit. Prospective customer visits a landing page.
  2. Lead / sign up form. Usually, it is the first time the customer is asked to provide contact details.
  3. ‍Interacting with marketing content. Customers often like to read more about the products before they convinced to contact. This may happen on the website or by reading e-mail newsletter and social media content.
  4. ‍Purchase. Happens online, but because of complexity of the funnel often not attributed to the first touch marketing source correctly.

In most implementations, Able Customer Data Platform uses a simplified three-stage conversion funnel map:

  • Page Views - when a website visitors accesses landing page or internal website page.
  • Leads - when a website visitor completes a contact or a lead form.
  • Purchases - when a purchase is completed in the e-commerce store.
Able Customer Data Platform makes it easy to track sources of each purchase and attribute them to the initial visitors, making sure attribution data in Google Analytics, Google Ads and Facebook Ads reflect actual sources of the customers.

How to Track Sources of E-Commerce Sales

Understanding what website visitor resulted in a sale is a key for understanding customer journeys and making informed marketing strategy decisions.

Able Customer Data Platform builds a 360-degree view of each customer by tracking website visitors before they become customer. Able CDP tracking script captures:

  • UTM Parameters
  • Referrer URL
  • Ad Click Id (fbclid/gclid) and browser identifiers for IOS 14+ traffic.
  • Landing Page URL

Able CDP then starts to build a customer profile, by tracking all website activity and, most importantly, lead and sign up form submissions, recording personal information such as:

  • E-mail
  • Phone
  • Proprietary client identifiers

This allows Able CDP to associate each closed won deal with the original customer source, implement first-touch attribution and understand what marketing activity brought each customer and each dollar of revenue.

Visitor view screenshot
Complete customer view in Able Customer Data Platform, associating an 'offline' purchase with online page views and lead forms activity, which was then attributed and sent to Google Analytics as an e-commerce purchase conversion.

Where multiple domains are used in the same funnel, Able CDP is able to link activity across them as long as one of the visitor identifiers match. We recommend using Google Tag Domain Linker for this purpose.

Using Able Customer Data Platform allows to collect all this information without having to program a database for storing attribution details and associating them to leads and customers. Entire set-up is done by placing a small tracking code for tracking website visitors and leads.

Integrate Conversion Data

Able Customer Data Platform uses its customer tracking data to attribute all subsequent revenue (Purchases) to the source.

Revenue can be sent to to Able CDP using one of its built-in integrations such as Clickfunnels purchase tracking, allowing to track completed purchases and attribute them to original website visits automatically.

It also supports tracking of custom conversions from proprietary apps using web hooks.

Able CDP then attributes each Purchase event to the original visitor and sends Purchase events to all standard integrations such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Conversions API, Google Ads API etc.

This is the most popular solution, as it allows to leverage reporting capabilities of the reporting tools you're already using. Correct first-touch attribution as implemented by Able CDP allows to capture of up to 24 months of LTV data attributed to the original campaign inside Google Analytics.

Implementation Example

Able Customer Data Platform E-Commerce Conversion Funnel Tracking is incredibly easy to set up:

  1. Sign up for an Able CDP account.
  2. Add lead form tracking code to the website. Able CDP analyzes lead forms on the website and generates custom tracking code displayed in Able CDP Dashboard.
  3. Connect Able CDP to the e-commerce platform to track purchases. See example for Clickfunnels purchase tracking.

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