Verify tracking pixel installation

verifying that your tracking pixels are set up correctly ensures that ambassador link clicks and referred orders are accurately attributed within roster there are two key tracking pixels the link tracking pixel, which records incoming referral clicks, and the order tracking pixel, which attributes completed purchases to the correct ambassador this guide walks you through verifying both types of tracking to confirm your program is properly configured video walkthrough video transcript this is a transcript from the loom video walkthrough 00 00 hey there, this is jeff at roster in this video, i'm gonna walk you through how you can verify that your tracking pixels have been set up correctly, and that you're ready to launch your ambassador program 00 11 there's two different pixels in roster, and you're gonna want to verify both of them the first pixel is what we call our link tracking pixel, and that is set to track incoming link clicks when somebody clicks on one of your ambassador's referral links 00 24 and that puts something in the browser storage so that when an order is made, the order can be attributed back to the ambassador 00 31 which is the other type of tracking pixel that gets installed with roster, which is the order tracking pixel when an order is completed and the confirmation page is displayed, that sends information from the user's browser up to roster, and includes the information of which the ambassador ultimately 00 49 had led them to a referral let's go ahead and look at how we can verify both of those tracking, or both of those pixel types 00 57 so the first thing we're going to do is come into our list of contacts, and we're going to get one of our ambassador's referral links 01 04 and there's two different types of referral links in roster there's what we call our legacy referral links, and our newer smart links 01 12 we're going to take a look first at the, at the legacy referral link so this influencer program is set up with just our regular legacy referral link 01 21 so i'm going to click into a contact who's in that program, and i'm going to scroll to the discounts and links section 01 27 and here i can see the ambassador's referral link and i know this is a legacy referral link because it's just the brand's domain and then a question mark 01 36 and then this roster tracking code that gets put into what's called the query string this rstr is what roster looks for 01 45 and then if it finds it, it sends up whatever it's set to, which is this, which is always going to be the ambassador's unique tracking code 01 53 so what we're going to do is copy this and paste it into an incognito window and you can go up to usually the file menu when you're in your browser and open up an incognito window or a private window 02 07 and it will typically look something like this and it's really important to note that when you're testing with an incognito window, if you happen to have more than one incognito window open like that, or multiple incognito tabs open like that, then what you need to do when you're restarting your testing 02 25 another ambassador's link or code, you want to make sure you close down all incognito windows for that browser otherwise, even though they're incognito, the different windows and tabs hold on to context and you don't want that context to go in between each of your tests 02 42 so make sure you just close them all out so in this case, i'm going to open up a new incognito window and i'm going to, paste in this ambassador's referral link 02 52 and then roster, as i mentioned, is looking for this little value up in the query string and if it finds it, it sends it up to the roster servers through our public api 03 02 and then it would register a link click so, when i come back into roster and look at this ambassador's profile, i can see that they have nine link clicks right now 03 10 and then when i do a page refresh, it should increment that and sure enough, it's now incremented to ten link clicks 03 17 so i have a high degree of confidence that link tracking is working if you have if you're you're developers, or if you are the developer, you didn't install the roster tracking code across all pages on your website, maybe you just put it on the home page 03 30 and i want to make sure that people are aware that if for some reason, somebody was to link out to, say, one of the collection pages, and they had that roster tracking link in there 03 40 if they link to a page that doesn't have the roster link tracking code installed on it, then it won't capture that as a roster link click 03 50 and it won't capture that as a sale if somebody goes through the order so it's really important you make sure that the tracking pixel is installed on all possible landing pages where somebody might come in 04 00 and i'm, with an ambassador's link okay so let's take a look now at what a smart link looks like for a contact 04 07 so i'm gonna switch programs this ambassador program i have set up has smart links enabled and you can tell that smart links are enabled by looking at the referral link 04 18 and you can see here, this is the, um, referral, the smart link start out with rstr co is the domain and then the brand's handle comes next and then the ambassador's tracking code comes after that 04 29 so this is a smart link right here and when we open up a new incognito window and paste that in, you will see that the browser does a redirect to the brand's website 04 43 and that roster tracking code is inside the url you'll also notice that there are a handful of utm parameters so smart links allow you as the brand to use your google analytics or whatever analytics software you're using to further track link clicks and, uh, click through funnels and attribution all 05 03 the way through in your link tracking software as well so, or analytics software okay, so now if i'm going to, i'm going to tab back over to the window here and i'm going to hit refresh that 05 13 should increment the link clicks for this ambassador from 12 to 13 and it did so, again, i know that link tracking is working here 05 21 okay, perfect the next thing i want to do is do order tracking so we're going to actually make an order off that link click 05 26 we just did and because we came through an ambassador's link, then the order should be attributed to the ambassador as a referral and just one caveat to throw out a f ing 05 37 when you are placing an order, this is really important, actually when you're placing an order on your store, you need to make sure that you don't use an email address that also exists within sight of your, uhm, contacts in your, in your roster account 05 53 if, if you were to use, let's say, uh, you already added yourself as an ambassador and then you go check out and you use your own email 06 01 well, that incoming order would actually be captured as a personal order, not as a referred order, just because that's how the roster attribution logic works 06 11 we can try to match up people's personal orders as a personal order so we can show you how much your ambassadors are spending and then those personal orders aren't eligible for referral rewards 06 23 okay, so let's come back over to this tab where, we had clicked on colleen's link and now we're just simply going to make a purchase and i can just add something to the cart and go right to check out and then i'm gonna be sure to use an email address that i know does not already exist inside of my account 06 43 , so my roster account, that is it's okay if they exist inside your store okay, i'm gonna put in some fake information here and everybody's store is different in terms of how do you push through a test transaction 06 58 i happen to have this in test mode most brands don't have the luxury of being able to go into test mode, so you're probably just gonna have to put in an order and then cancel it after you've verified it inside of roster 07 08 okay, so with all that information put in i'm gonna click pay now and that will read redirect me most shopping carts will redirect to a thank you page or a confirmation page and this is where the order tracking pixel is installed and when this page loads that javascript or that tracking pixel executes 07 27 and it sends this order information along with the tracking code up to rosters public api and that's how rosters able to then track it and check to see if there is an actually an order 07 39 so with this order placed, i can now close this window here and what i'm gonna do is click over onto the reports tab and open up the all orders and see if the order is there 07 58 okay, so it looks like my order came through and what you can do on the orders page and make sure your date range is set correctly 08 05 if you're coming here, maybe you had a previous date range and you want to make sure that the order is within that date range 08 11 but i can click on the order drawer and this happened pretty quickly sometimes it can take up to a few minutes for the attribution process to run 08 19 but i can see here in the order details section of this drawer that the referral link id passed in was calling 08 25 7 8 jones rstr and that the attribution was considered a referral and it is to colleen because somebody used her referral link and it's for a new customer 08 37 so everything is working great from order tracking or from a link perspective awesome okay, the last test we want to do is we want to test whether 08 49 we're not, uh, uh, uh, a shareable discount code that's assigned to an ambassador is working so let's come into see how our programs are configured and see if we have a shareable discount code for any of these programs 09 08 okay, so it looks like we have a shareable discount code set up for the influencer program so let's go ahead and come over to find, let's find one of these codes that we can test with 09 22 and you can always just manually add one of these codes in fact, let's do that let's come to our contacts 09 27 and let's come into, uh, we'll go into joseph thomas who's in the influencer program and we'll expand their profile and we're going to go to the discounts and links section 09 41 and it looks like this, this person already has a code, a shareable code assigned to them so i'm just simply going to copy that 09 53 and then what we're going to do is we're going to open up a new incognito window this is where it's really important 10 01 cause if you, don't close out all the incognito windows and you do this test in a browser window that has, that hasn't been reset, it will still have reference to that last referral link you tested with 10 14 and in roster, uhm, the way referral attribution works is the attribution first goes to a link if there was a link click, it goes to the link and then it will go to a, discount code 10 27 so, i'm gonna open up a new incognito window and i'm gonna go to the website alright, and now we're gonna do another purchase 10 39 i'm gonna put the client now and then i'm gonna paste in that discount code ah, this discount code okay, so i must have constrained this discount code to something specific 10 55 so i'm gonna show you real quickly maybe you'll bump into the same problem yourself okay, so creator, friends, and family 11 02 i see this this is the discount rule that's defining the code that i'm trying to use and i'm just gonna click on this view and shopify right now 11 10 and log in to my shopify store and it will bring up the disk, the top of the whole discount code in here 11 15 uh, looks like i constrained this to a specific product so maybe i was doing a test for something else so i can either remove that constraint, um, or i can, um, just go find one of these specific products 11 31 so let's just go find the 3p fulfilled snowboard so we're gonna come back to, uhh, actually just go to the search 11 40 3p there we go and we're gonna click the add to cart view cart and check out i'm gonna paste in that code 11 51 oops okay, and hit apply okay, perfect now we got that code coming in and it looks like it knocked 50 bucks off that so, let's go ahead and create our fake user 12 16 fake credit card info 12 33 gonna be great if all credit cards were that short okay, we're gonna hit pay now and now, in theory, what happened with the order tracking pixel is, because we hadn't come through a link click, there's no link tracking code that was sent up for the ambassador 12 50 but roster does have you set set it up to have the discount codes excuse me, the discount codes sent through 12 59 so let's come back into our roster account and what we want to look for is, we want to go into our reports and all orders 13 13 and it looks like that order has come through and the good news is, it worked okay, so in the order details drawer, i can see in the order there was no referral link id 13 24 but there was a discount code and roster was able to identify that discount code as belonging to joseph thomas and that is a shareable code 13 34 so in, as a result, it counts as a referral so that was the order tracking using a shareable code so if you have the link tracking working, the link, the order tracking working from referral links and the order tracking working from discount codes, there's a really, really, really high likelihood that 13 56 everything is working correctly now if you bumped into any issues along the way, be sure to check out our troubleshooting article 14 02 pretty cool or if you want to just get some help straight away because you don't like looking at articles, just shoot us an email support at getroster com and we'll be more than happy to just jump right on with you and walk you through what might be the problem 14 16 in the meantime, have a great day and do good out step by step instructions test 1 verify the link tracking pixel open roster and navigate to the contacts section select an ambassador who is is in a program and scroll to the discounts and links section identify the ambassador’s referral link legacy referral link format is https //brand com/?rstr=tracking code smart link format is https //rstr co/brand/tracking code copy the referral link and open an incognito or private browser window paste the link and visit the brand’s website close all incognito windows before testing another referral link to reset tracking context back in roster, refresh the ambassador’s profile page to confirm the link click count increments if the count does not increase, see troubleshoot pixel installation docid\ fidpbli52z4lgdqqlw3vs test 2 verify the order tracking pixel via referral link for this test, we want to confirm that when an order is made after clicking on an ambassador's referral link, it is captured in roster as a referred order with an attribution type of referral link using the incognito window where you tested the referral link, add an item to the cart and proceed to checkout ensure the email used at checkout is not associated with an existing ambassador account in roster complete the checkout process and wait for the confirmation page to load this page triggers roster's order tracking pixel, which sends the order data to roster back in roster, navigate to reports > all orders , and confirm the order appears click on the order to open the order details drawer confirm that the order is attributed to the ambassador whose link you clicked if the order doesn't appear or isn't attributed to the ambassador, see troubleshoot pixel installation docid\ fidpbli52z4lgdqqlw3vs test 3 verify the order tracking pixel via shareable code for this test, we want to confirm that when an order is made with an ambassador's shareable discount code, it is captured in roster as a referred order with an attribution type of discount code be sure to completely close all incognito / private browser windows and tabs before running this second test to ensure that this second order doesn't have the previous order's link tracking pixel in roster, navigate to more > discounts in the left hand navigation find a shareable discount rule (see shareable discount rules docid\ htkg19i6ld2vqk0vkqonu for additional context if needed ) use one of the assigned discount codes for this test or, see manually assign discount codes docid\ ngdtyh8mcaaqohkze3dek for instructions on assigning a shareable discount code to an ambassador copy an ambassador's shareable code to your clipboard open a new incognito / private browser window navigate directly to your store (don't use an ambassador's referral link as this will give attribution to the link and not the shareable code ) add an eligible item to the shopping cart and proceed to checkout enter the copied shareable discount code and confirm that it was successfully applied to the checkout flow complete the purchase using an email address that is not associated with an ambassador in your roster account back in roster, navigate to reports > all orders , and confirm the order appears click on the order to open the order details drawer confirm that the order is attributed to the ambassador whose link you clicked if the order doesn't appear or isn't attributed to the ambassador, see troubleshoot pixel installation docid\ fidpbli52z4lgdqqlw3vs need help? if you experience any issues verifying tracking pixels, refer to our troubleshooting guide or contact our support team at support\@getroster com mailto\ support\@getroster com