If you’re seeing more conversions in ClickMagick than you’ve actually generated, the most common cause is that you’ve added conversion tracking code to a page that isn’t a dedicated “thank you” page.

Depending on your setup and how visitors interact with your site or online store, this can sometimes cause extra conversions to be recorded as they repeatedly visit the page over and over.

Let’s discuss this issue, and more importantly, the solution ...


What is a dedicated “thank you” page?

A dedicated “thank you” page is a page that a visitor will access only once, after a conversion is generated.

For example, after someone makes a purchase, most systems will display some type of “thank you” page that the visitor will only ever see after making a purchase, and this page can’t be accessed any other way.

This is the best type of “thank you” page as there is no chance a visitor will generate duplicate conversions.


What is a non-dedicated “thank you” page?

A non-dedicated “thank you” page is any page that has ClickMagick Conversion Tracking Code on it, where there’s the possibility that visitors will land on the page even without a legitimate conversion being generated.

For example, say you run a membership site and after new users sign up they are redirected straight to the home page of your membership site so you need to add your sales tracking code there.

This would be a non-dedicated “thank you” page because your customers will continue to visit this page over and over every time they login and access the membership site.


So what’s the problem with a non-dedicated “thank you” page?

The problem is that based on your exact setup and how users interact with your site or online store, non-dedicated “thank you” pages can sometimes cause duplicate conversions to be recorded as your visitors or customers continue to access your “thank you” pages over and over again.

In most cases this does not happen, because ClickMagick is very good at identifying visitors and we do everything we possibly can to prevent duplicate conversions from being recorded.

But it can happen. Consider the following example …

Using the membership site example above, say that someone signs up for your membership site today and a sale is recorded. Then a month from now they go on vacation …

While on vacation, using their friends’ laptop – which they’ve never used to access your site before – they type your brand or product name into Google to get to your site, and click the first thing at the top of the page which is your paid ad.

This will generate a new unique ad click, for what looks like a completely new visitor, and as soon as they login to access your membership site as an existing customer a new sale will be recorded.


Wow, I would have never thought of that. So what’s the solution?

If possible you should implement a dedicated “thank you” page. But if you can’t, don’t worry, there’s a simple solution. Let’s start by taking a look at some standard sales tracking code …

 

The first thing you’ll want to do is remove the cmc_goal line from your conversion tracking code. Just delete the entire line.

Then, rather than having the cmc_goal parameter hard-coded in your tracking code on your page, you’ll want to add it only to the redirect URL used when a new customer signs up.

So for example, if right now you redirect new customers into your membership site by sending them to this URL:

https://www.mysite.com/members/

You’ll simply add the cmc_goal=s parameter to the end of the URL and redirect them to this modified URL instead:

https://www.mysite.com/members/?cmc_goal=s

This takes advantage of the fact that any of ClickMagick’s “cmc parameters” can be provided in either your tracking code or your URLs (and values provided in your URLs will always override the same value in your tracking code).

And by doing this you have essentially created a dedicated “thank you” page by ensuring the user can only trigger the sales tracking code once when they first purchase.

Article 893 Last updated: 07/20/2023 8:16:15 AM
https://www.clickmagick.com/kb/?article=893