What Qualifies as a Conversion Event?

As a rule of thumb, a conversion event is any user activity that directly impacts your business' performance goals. That could include purchases, newsletter sign-ups, completing a course, sharing a post and more. 

Why Send Conversion Events?

Conversion events shape the way that our algorithm chooses to prioritize content recommendations. In an (extremely) over-simplified example, say that you have two pieces of content that are tied for first place as a recommendation for a particular user. If you are sending conversion events, our system would rank the item that has been involved in more conversions (e.g. it has been seen or clicked on by more users who also eventually triggered a conversion event) higher. It would then "win" over the other item and be shown first.

Conversion events don't make sense for all customers - they are primarily used by E-commerce and B2B companies, but can be useful for other industries as well. If you're not sure if using a conversion event is the right way to accomplish your goal, please reach out to our Support team! We'll meet with you to discuss your goals and help make any changes needed.

How To Send a Conversion Event

Using $p("send") at the time conversion event occurs will allow our system to track the event. This function takes two arguments - the name of the event ("conversion") and the context object, which can include any custom information you'd like to include. Data values in the context object can be either strings, numbers, or an array of strings (no nested arrays!). 

The typical values sent in the context object are "conversion_t", which tells us specifically what kind of conversion it is, and the "source" which tells us if the conversion should be attributed to LiftIgniter.

// Newsletter Signup
$p("send", "conversion",{
  //What kind of conversion happened
  conversion_t: "newsletter signup",
  //If a LiftIgniter recommendation was responsible for the conversion
  source: "LI"
})

//Two different events may count as conversions in e-commerce - adding to cart and purchasing. Both types can be tracked separately.
// Adding to Cart
$p("send", "conversion",{
  source: "LI",
  conversion_t: "add to cart",
  // You can also tell us which items were added, and their price
  id: "PRODUCT_ID",
  price: 1.0
})

// Completing a Purchase
$p("send", "conversion",{
  source: "LI",
  conversion_t: "purchase",
  id: "PRODUCT_ID",
  price: 1.0
})

Choosing "source" names

How you label the "source" value in a conversion event will depend on the level of tracking and granularity or attribution you are able to do. If you are able to track and attribute conversions to specific widgets (possibly using the _igClkHis information described in the next section, or your own methods) in an A|B test:

• If LiftIgniter provided the recommendation that led to the conversion, then source="LI"
• If the conversion came from the control slice version of that same widget, then source="base"
• If the conversion came from any other non-widget source, then source="other" (or any custom identifier that you can recognize e.g. "promotion" or "ad-campaign").

If you are unable to implement very granular tracking for conversion, then you can simply label all conversions for users on the LiftIgniter slice of the A|B test as "LI" and all conversions in the control slice can be labeled as "base" to compare the overall numbers. 

"LI" and "base" are the standard values used in our models and should be used for any widget-related conversions.

Using LiftIgniter data to determine source attribution

You can use this solution if you don't already have a way to track what items users have clicked on. 

In the user's local storage, the _igClkHis key stores a stringified JavaScript string array. This array keeps track of the ten most recent things a user has clicked on for a given widget. Each of the string values in the string array is a pipe ('|') separated value that contains the URL user clicked on, the name of the widget they clicked on to get to that item, and the source (who generated the recommendations - if LiftIgniter, the value will be "LI". If it was the control slice in an A|B test the value will be "base").

You can use this to keep track of conversions based on a direct click. In other words, if the item they converted on is listed in the _igClkHis, then attribution for the conversion should be given to that widget. Deeper investigation (i.e. how does having the widget shown affect conversion and similar questions) can be done on our end.