Tracking revenue (available in ClickTracks Pro only) is a fundamental way to measure the success of your website and your advertising campaigns. Although you can get useful information from configuring just the campaigns or just the revenue tracking, it is most powerful when both have been configured. With both revenue tracking and campaigns configured, you can see return on advertising spend (ROAS) data not only on your various campaigns but also on specific key phrases from search engines.
Setting up revenue tracking is usually a simple, straightforward process, but it does require some web development that depends on your existing architecture and requirements. The method used to track revenue depends on whether your data is gathered through web server logfiles or through a JavaScript snippet in your site (as when you are using ClickTracks Hosted service or the JavaScript Data Collector (JDC)). It also depends on whether the ecommerce system is based on your own code running on your web server or is a hosted service running on another company's server. If the latter, the method used is subject to the architecture of that third-party system. This document addresses all the various possibilities. Your first step is to determine which of these systems you use, then follow the instructions for that method.
Regardless of how your ecommerce system is designed, the key objective is to get sales data recorded into your dataset as the value for a very specific parameter. The name of the parameter does not have to be anything in particular. You can name it whatever you choose (e.g., order, order_total, SaleAmount, ctrev, etc.). It simply has to be used strictly for the purpose of passing the order total. This way, as ClickTracks processes your data, every time it finds that specific parameter in a request, it knows that the value is a sale and will add it to the sales total and do any other mathematics required to generate your various revenue results.
How does ClickTracks know that this is the revenue parameter? You tell ClickTracks in the Revenue Tracking Setup Wizard. From the home page, click on the Campaign, Sales, and ROI Report, then click the Revenue Tracking icon to bring up the Revenue Tracking Wizard.
Select "Track revenue by logfile parameter." If you are passing the amount in the URL parameter, it will appear in the drop-down menu (e.g., "ctrev", below). Once you've done this, ClickTracks has all it needs to do revenue tracking and ROI analysis.
