You will use conversion tags when you want to understand how successful your online advertising campaign was. A conversion just means that someone created an order as a result of following a link from your advertisement. Sometimes the advertising service will just count the number of conversions; sometimes they will be able to record the conversion revenue. The interesting thing about conversion tags is that you will not typically have to provide a set of triggers to fire the tag only if the visitor to your website followed a link from your advertisement. Instead, these services will track conversion through cookies. When your customer follows the advertisement link a cookie will be set on their browser. The conversion is recorded based on the presence of that cookie. This also means that a conversion can be recorded even if the customer followed the advertisement a few weeks back. If you Google
conversion tracking cookie you’ll find plenty of documentation describing this process if you want to understand it more.
We’re referring to this tag as ‘basic’ because we are not going to do anything too clever with the quantity of products on the order or the individual product values at this point. We don’t even care whether the product purchased is the same product advertised in the pay-per-click campaign. In this tag all we are going to tell the advertising service is the total amount of the order and the order number. We’ll leave firing tags for specific products on the order and getting their quantities and amounts for
Use Case 4 – Implementing Conversion Tags for Specific Products.
Implementation
The video below demonstrates the steps required to complete this use case. Please watch the video in conjunction with the documentation.
In this use case we will be creating a
DoubleClick Floodlight Sales tag to track conversion from an imaginary DoubleClick pay-per-click advertising campaign. We will provide the tag with the total order amount and the order number. The tag configuration will expect you to provide the 'Advertiser ID', 'Group Tag String' and 'Activity Tag String' for your advertisement. The Google Tag Manager user interface will usually advise you where to get these values from. If you are creating this type of tag on behalf of a third party marketing agency you will need to request these values from them. If you are just following this use case for learning and don’t intend to publish this tag you can use some dummy data for these fields,
12345 will work just fine.
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Required Variables
For this tag we need two pieces of information from the page.
- What was the order number of the created order?
- What was the total order amount of the created order?
Let’s create these two variables now.
- Choose the option to create a new variable.
- Give the variable a name.
- Set the 'Variable Type' to Data Layer Variable.
- Set the 'Data Layer Variable Name' to av.order.order_number.
- Set the 'Data Layer Version' to Version 2.
- Repeat the process from Step 1 to create another new variable but this time set the 'Data Layer Variable Name' to av.order.grand_total.amount.
Required Triggers
This tag will fire when an order is created. If you have not already created a trigger for this:
- Choose the option to create a new trigger.
- Create a condition of {{event}} equals av.event.order-created.
- Save the trigger.
Configuring the Tag
- Choose the option to create a new tag.
- Choose the DoubleClick Floodlight Sales tag type
- Enter your 'Advertiser ID'.
- Enter your 'Group Tag String'.
- Enter your 'Activity Tag String'.
- Set the counting method to Transactions.
- Set the 'Revenue' parameter to the variable you created for av.order.grand_total.amount.
- Set the ‘Order ID’ parameter to the variable you created for av.order.order_number.
- Add a 'Firing Trigger' and choose the trigger you created to fire on av.event.order-created.
- Save the tag.
- Preview and debug your container.
- In a new browser window navigate to your website.
- Use Google Tag Assistant to confirm that:
- The tag is firing only on order completion, and
- The tag contains the order total amount and the order number.
- Publish your container and make your tag live.
Summary
We created a tag to track DoubleClick conversions from a pay-per-click advertising campaign. This tag only fired when a visitor created an order online. We provided the tag with the total order amount and the order number of the order. We did not need to provide any extra triggers about firing this tag only when the visitor arrived via our advertisement; cookies take care of this for us.