Skip to content

Content Conversions setup overview

Note

More about Parse.ly conversions offerings

Conversion types

Parse.ly Conversions currently supports five standard conversion types and one custom type:

  1. Subscription – When a user buys a subscription that will result in recurring revenue.
  2. Newsletter Signup – When a user provides their email via a form in order to receive emails from a company, such as a newsletter or an email course.
  3. Lead Capture – When a user provides identifying details (e.g. email, name) via a form to indicate they have interest in what the company is selling (i.e. a lead).
  4. Link Click – When a user clicks a link or button to an external site (e.g. an affiliate link or a link to a third party site where a conversion occurs).
  5. Purchase – When a user completes the one-time purchase of a product.

Note: In the future, Parse.ly may provide benchmark comparisons of the standard categories of events (e.g. comparing how your newsletter signup performance compares to rest of the Parse.ly network). For this reason, we discourage using custom types except when absolutely necessary.

Conversion actions

For conversions, there are five categories of conversion events, plus custom events: Each conversion action is a combination of two identifying attributes:

  • Type – The category of the conversion listed in the section above. Parse.ly supports six types, which you can choose from.
  • Label – The name of the specific action taken by a user (described in the parameter). You have the freedom to customize and specify the label. Avoid special characters such as / and _ as they will not encode properly.

Important requirements

  • You must be able to put Parse.ly tracking on pages or forms where conversions occur and on any pages that users view on their way to converting.
  • Conversions can only be tracked on web traffic at this time. We do not currently support conversions tracking which occurs on AMP, FBIA, APN or mobile app traffic.
  • All pages must have valid metadata provided to Parse.ly.

What counts as a conversion action?

A conversion action is when a user interacts with a unique set of HTML elements (usually a form or button) on your site. For instance, you may want to track subscriptions on two different sites. Without knowing the details of the HTML element, these may all appear to be the same conversion action.

When looking at the code, we can see whether the HTML elements are the same or if they are all different. 

For example, take the following HTML:

<html>
 <body>
  <div class="click-me">
   <form id="subscription-form">
    <!-- inputs and form stuff -->
   </form>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

Parse.ly will bind a conversion to the form id #subscription-form in the conversions configuration package. If the same <form id="subscription-form"></form> appeared elsewhere on your site or on a different site within your network of sites, that would also be counted as the same conversion.

However, if you wanted to track the conversion above and this one:

<html>
 <body>
  <div class="click-here">
   <form id="subscribe">
    <!-- inputs and form stuff -->
   </form>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

That would count as two separate conversions because the form Parse.ly would have to bind to has the ID subscribe and not subscription-form, which counts as a different conversion.

Integration types: Parse.ly-managed low-code vs. Self-Managed

Parse.ly-managed low-code integration

This might be right for you if:

  • The events you want to track and the pages where they exist will likely remain unchanged for at least a year.
  • Your pages and HTML elements adhere to an ideal, expected standard for conversion tracking.
  • You have limited access to a developer to help you implement conversions tracking.

Pros

  • You and/or your development team don’t have to write or maintain conversions tracking code.
  • You will benefit from ongoing Parse.ly development, including bugfixes and features based on our extensive experience managing conversions for other customers.

Cons

  • While you won’t need to have your own developer write tracking code, you may need a developer’s help to update code if the HTML elements on your site are not unique enough for Parse.ly to distinguish between events.
  • When you make a change to your site, it may break conversions tracking, and you’ll need to notify the Parse.ly integrations or support team and wait while we update the tracking. Because of the high volume of conversions tracking requests our team handles, this change could take several weeks.
  • If you want to track a new conversion event, you will need to give the Parse.ly team several weeks’ notice ahead of when you want the conversion event to go live. Because of the high volume of conversions tracking requests our team handles, we can’t commit to implementing this new event during your expected timeframe. 

Self-managed integration

This might be right for you if:

  • You plan to change or add to the events you’re tracking frequently (e.g. every few months).
  • You have a Google Tag Manager container installed on the page.
  • You already have conversion event triggers defined for other tools and systems, and it would be best to keep that logic centralized and send Parse.ly conversion events directly.
  • You have an in-house or agency development team available to set up and maintain the integration.
  • Your site is pre-launch and nobody outside your team is able to access the site before it goes live.

Pros

  • Complete control over your integration.
  • Whenever you want to track a new conversion event (provided that you are within your contractually agreed conversions events limit) or change an existing conversion event, you can do so yourself, without waiting on the Parse.ly team.

Cons

  • You are responsible for the configuration being correct, and maintaining and updating that configuration as your site changes.
  • You will need to carefully consider and handle a variety of load order and race conditions, because the business logic is separated from the Parse.ly tracker module.
  • Any changes to conversion integrations require site deploys.

Parse.ly-managed low-code integrations details

Just exactly how low-code is this integration, and how does it work? Simply follow the steps below:

1. Conversions Information Form

Filling out the form that our integrations team sends via email is the first step. Please watch this instructional video that will walk you through filling out the form:

2. Once Parse.ly confirms the form has been filled out correctly, we will implement the code on your site through the Parse.ly tracker

3. You test to verify conversions are integrated correctly

Self-managed integration

If you decide to move forward with this integration option, you can implement via Google Tag Manager or see the instructions in our detailed conversions integration documentation here for code samples and configuration details.

A warning note on iframes

Tracking conversions in iframes is only possible if the Parse.ly tracker can be placed in the iframe. This requires developer work to add our tracker to the page, and also set PARSELY.autotrack = false, in addition to calling relevant tracker methods.

<script>
  window.PARSELY = window.PARSELY || {
    autotrack: false,
    onload: function() {
      // add event listeners
    }
  };
</script>
<!-- START Parse.ly Include -->
<!-- ... as above ... -->
<!-- END Parse.ly Include -->

How to test conversions events

It is important to be able to test sending conversions without actually sending the event and cluttering up your reports with tests! We recommend using the following method to test all conversions on your site:

Parse.ly-Managed Conversions:

  1. Open the developer console and filter console to Debug: Conversion
  2. Select the “Settings” symbol in the top right, and then select “Preserve log”
  3. Paste this command into the console: PARSELY.config.customizations.debug = true;
  4. Do the conversion action and look in the console for a message like this: Debug: Conversion event would have been sent with type "Link Click" and label "Link Click".

Self-Managed Conversions (see steps & screenshot below):

  1. Open the developer console and switch to the Network tab
  2. Select “Preserve log” box
  3. In the “Search” box, type action=conversion
  4. Do the conversion action and look in the network log for a name that starts with: ?rand=
  5. Select the event above and scroll to the bottom of the event details to make sure the data field has the correct conversion type and conversion label
How to Test Conversion Events

Last updated: April 25, 2023