Leveraging 1st Party Data Conversions for Transparent Reporting
The only way to ensure your attribution is accurate is to be able to transparently prove your numbers are correct.
The only way to do that is to use 1st party data conversions. This page describes all the possible conversions that get reported in your data, and which ones you should focus on.
What are 1st party data conversions
1st party data conversions are those that occur from collection of data from your website visitors, leads, and customers. This data is coming directly from your marketing and/or customer base, so it is more valuable and more trustworthy.
There are several sources of 1st party data conversions. Here are the most common ones Wicked Reports uses via integration to the 1st party data system, CSV upload, or API.
The raw data from your shopping cart is the most valuable conversion you have - revenue! The identity of the customer, the time and date of the purchase, the amount, and the products purchased are all generally 1st party data gathered from this source.
Wicked Reports uses shopping cart sales as the main source of sales conversion data that powers CAC, LTV, and ROAS.
When customers purchase a subscription and billing continues to recur, this is likely the most valuable set of customers you have.
Traditional sales conversion tracking relies on website traffic URL to identify when a sale occurred. But a recurring subscription payment does not hit a URL, it processes a payment on a server. So traditional sales conversion tracking (such as Meta, Google Ads, and TikTok) miss these most valuable customers.
Wicked Reports integrates with the recurring subscription payment systems so that the recurring payments are counted as part of your sales & revenue. This gives true LTV, and can make subscription brand metrics much more positive for CAC and ROAS.
When a visitor clicks and arrives on your website, the information about that click can be harvested as 1st party data. Once that visitor is identified in the future, Wicked Reports fires up the Attribution Time Machine to determine when they first clicked to come to your site. This first click helps determine what is driving top of the funnel awareness from cold traffic.
Pixel fires
This is the most common way conversions are measured, and it’s flawed. You setup a goal URL as the conversion. When the URL gets hit, there is code on the page that sends a message to Meta, Google, Tiktok, and your email CRM that a conversion has occurred.
The problem is that 1 conversion has happened, but 4 (or many more) channels are receiving the event that a conversion has occurred.
All of the channels receiving the conversion event are likely to take full credit.
None of the channels are likely to give each other credit!
And you can’t connect the dots of which prospect, lead, or customer is being reported in the ad platform reporting as a conversion. So you cannot de-dupe and end up with inflated and inaccurate numbers.
Conversion APIs
The ad platforms allow you to send them conversions via their API using 1st party data. This is an improvement on using pixel fires for conversions.
The downside, like with pixel conversions:
All of the channels receiving the conversion event are likely to take full credit.
None of the channels are likely to give each other credit
You can’t connect the dots of which prospect, lead, or customer is being reported in the ad platform reporting as a conversion. So you cannot de-dupe and end up with inflated and inaccurate numbers.
Offline Conversions
Offline conversions exist to allow you to send the ad platforms conversions that happened in real life. You can upload them via API or CSV, and then the ad platforms use the event time of the offline conversion to work backwards and determine what ad influenced the offline conversion event.
View Through Conversions
Marketers and brands usually have a strong like or dislike of view-through conversions.
A view-through conversion is reported by an ad platform when they receive notification of a conversion from pixel, conversion API, offline conversion, or Meta shop.
The ad platform then looks back in time for the last ad impression not clicked, within a certain period of time, and gives the ad a view through conversion. The idea being that the person viewed the ad, then went directly to the website and made the purchase.
Wicked Reports allows you to modify the amount of view-through credit you wish to give Meta/Facebook, on the fly, so you can dynamically customize a view’s influence based on the situation.
AI data-driven “conversions”
These are conversions that can’t be proved - because they aren’t real. AI infers that a sales conversion happened.
This is done when a platform doesn’t have enough data and wishes to hide behind AI.
An extremely well-known Google Ads buyer relayed a story with an attribution platform that uses AI for conversions. All 3 of his ad groups showed 12.7 conversions for a given time period - making it 37.1 sales. His actual store had less sales than that.
AI is a helpful tool for many things. Creating phantom conversions should not be one of them.
Validating Conversions:
Leveraging First-Party Data for Trustworthy Insights
Which conversions are most important
The most important conversions are the ones that lead to more efficiently acquired future conversions (sorry - that was annoying).
Our opinion is that top of the funnel conversions tied to future sales conversions are the most important, because otherwise your future sales will dip. If you don’t know what is getting future customers engaged with your brand so that they later convert, you will never be able to scale.
How to prove the conversions are real
The best way to know you have accurate conversions is to be able to see the actual conversion.
For a sale, this means the customer that made the purchase, the sale date & time, the sale amount, and the product(s) purchased, and the ID of the sale from the Shopping Cart.
For a lead, this means the prospect’s email address, the optin date & time, and the ID of the contact from the CRM.
For a click, the date/time of the click, and the origination site.
Understanding how conversions at TOF drive conversions at BOF
It is extremely important to understand how Top of Funnel drives Bottom of Funnel. Great media buyers use great data to learn, understand, and exploit the TOF campaigns, audiences, and ads that find future customers.
This is especially important and powerful with the death of the 3rd party cookie. Data will get worse inside the ad platforms and the measurement focus will be on trusting a black box, or focusing on the last click before the sale (because its easiest to track).
How Wicked Reports Uses 1st Party Data Conversions
1st party data conversions have been the foundation of Wicked Reports reporting since 2014.
We believe that 1st party data conversions are the only way to have data you can trust.
We also believe that 1st party data conversions are the highest quality data signal.
When the Wicked Coach tells you to scale your hard earned ad budget on a CAC or ROAS number is our platform, we can stand by that advice because of the quality of our conversion data and attribution algorithms built from that great data.