How Conversions are tracked
The definitions and terminology behind the Conversions product can be a little confusing to begin with.
Path
The path is most closely represented by the word "conversion". A path is created when a user views your content for the very first time. A path contains all of the user data, as well as contains an ordered list of steps (defined below). When a conversion is completed, the path is marked as "closed", and the conversion counter in your dashboard will reflect this change.
Step
A step represents one impression in a path, when you have a campaign requiring many different actions to proceed conversion. The idea of having a "step" helps us understand how a user completes your conversion, as well as giving us a picture on how long certain steps took, as well as where the user comes from (i.e. do they come from a social network? do they visit your content, wait 1 week, then come back from an ad unit click?)
Conversion Proxy
A conversion proxy is used to create a custom Nudge link which you can have as an action inside an ad unit, or a social post. This means that, for times where you cannot place a pixel, you can direct users to the link, we drop our pixel, and then redirect them to a destination piece of content that you define.
This also works perfectly for cases where you control the ad unit, and the final conversion page, but not the destination site. We can use our conversion proxy to simiulate having a pixel on the destination site, and have your usual conversion pixel on your success page or similar.
Please contact your account manager if you'd like this feature enabled.
How we calculate Traffic Source
The top traffic source area inside your conversions dashboard are calculated based on the traffic source we first see you from. An example:
1. You click a link from inside Facebook to your content. We tag you as Facebook.
2. You then come in and view another piece of content in the conversion path.
3. You convert. You will be tagged as Facebook.
Alternately, another example:
1. You visit the piece of content with UTM tags enabled, i.e. http://your-content.com/?utm_source=MyCampaign. We tag you as MyCampaign
2. You're inside Facebook, and click through to another piece of content.
3. You convert. You will be tagged as MyCampaign (even though we recognise Facebook, we ignore it.)
Or, if no traffic source is detected at the first step, we will mark you as "Direct" (even if we detect a traffic source in subsequent steps)
How we calculate Top Content
We determine top content by the URL visited BEFORE conversion, the one URL the user visited before hitting the conversion event.