Measuring conversions is crucial for leadgen websites and e-commerce stores to analyze the success of marketing campaigns. Traditional tracking methods have long been impractical, and even a standard tracking setup with Server-Side Tagging cannot guarantee 1-to-1 conversion measurements. These missed opportunities and inefficiencies in your tracking can be solved by using webhooks. By using webhooks at the time of a conversion, you can send real-time data directly to your server from the backend of your website, enabling 1-to-1 measurements in your marketing and analytics platforms. In this article, we explain what webhooks are, how to use them for accurate online tracking, and the pros and cons of this approach.
What are webhooks?
Webhooks are HTTP callbacks that enable real-time communication between american mobile number list different web applications. In Jip-and-Janneke language, this means that webhooks allow systems to automatically send messages to other systems when certain events occur. Sending those messages goes directly from system to system, allowing for direct and efficient information exchange.
In the case of online tracking, webhooks are primarily used to detect important events such as user purchases and returns in the backend of a webshop and send them to an external tracking or analytics tool via your server. When a specific event occurs in the backend of your webshop, an HTTP request with all relevant data is generated and sent to the preconfigured URL of your server container. So, in the case of a webshop, you can configure that when an order is created in the backend, a webhook with information about the e-commerce, the user, and the marketing is immediately sent to your server. From your GTM server container, you can transform the incoming data in that webhook into the appropriate events and parameters that your
To best feed a marketing algorithm with data about website visitor conversion and achieve the most accurate view of conversions per campaign or per marketing platform, you want to collect this data as accurately as possible, and only webhooks can muddy your collected data. When does it make sense to use webhooks for your online tracking setup?