View-Through Visit and Conversion Tracking: Report Overview

Note

This functionality is limited to our legacy display advertising product (tactics/campaigns launched pre-spring 2023). This feature will continue to function for any legacy tactics that still remain active in your instance, but it cannot be utilized with any current or future campaigns.

Prerequisites

To use this feature, you must have Terminus Ad Experiences as part of your Terminus subscription, and have the Terminus Visitor ID tracking script installed on your website. 

Feature Overview

In B2B digital advertising, clicks only tell a small part of the story. As a result, marketers have largely relied on conversion tracking to illustrate how their advertising efforts drive a return to their business. 

More specifically, conversion tracking is a functionality that provides visibility into how your digital advertising campaigns are influencing conversions on your website, as well as driving visitor traffic. Within the Terminus platform, users can track view-through visits and conversions driven by their account-based advertising campaigns, and use that information to understand their return on investment, and make better informed decisions about their advertising spend.

Feature Details

How Does Terminus’s View-Through Tracking Work?

As a part of this release, we’ll be making an update to our Visitor ID tracking script that is installed, or will be installed, on your website. This has two core additions:

1. Enables the tracking of conversions across your website.
2. Enables additional GDPR/CCPA compliance via support of new IAB V2.0 standards.

The graphic above describes the following process:

• Once you’ve installed the Visitor ID script, we will track visits to your website on a daily basis. 
• When someone sees a Terminus ad on an advertiser’s website, our DSP (demand-side platform) drops a cookie on that viewer’s device. 
• When that viewer then visits any page on your website with the Visitor ID script in place, or completes the conversion action you defined, our pixel recognizes the cookie, and we record it as a view-through conversion or visit. 

Some additional information about this process:

• This feature is based on cookie-level data, not reverse IP lookup (like Visitor ID’s standard website activity tracking).
• With view-through tracking, the activity recorded in Terminus is tied to the unique individual who saw the ad, and then came back and visited your site and/or converted (based on the unique cookie); not visits/conversions from anyone at the company. For privacy reasons, however, the activity is still rolled up to the account-level.
• Terminus’s view-through tracking was designed to quantitate the complete influence that advertising is having on conversions and site visits. It captures both events where an ad was viewed but not clicked, and then a visits/conversion occurred, and events where and ad was viewed and clicked. The main value with view-through tracking, however, is that conversions/visits from users that do not click on your ads. Ad clicks themselves can be tracked in other areas of the advertising platform (like the Campaign Overview Page).
• Users can easily configure the Visitor ID pixel (via a tool like Google Tag Manager), to only fire after a certain amount of time has been spent on your site.

Within the Terminus interface, it’s important to understand these terms: 

• View-through Conversion: A conversion action or event is an activity that is valuable to your business - like someone filling out a form to download a piece of content, or to request a demo. A view-through conversion is counted when a person is shown your Terminus ad (an impression is served), and then visits your website (either immediately, or at a later time) and completes a conversion activity. Both the conversion event and the timeframe between the impression and the site conversion can be configured in the Terminus interface.
• View-through Visit: Similar to a view-through conversion, a view-through visit is counted when a person is shown a Terminus ad (an impression is served), and then visits your website, (either immediately, or at a later date), and visits any page. This metric is important, as it illustrates the impact that proactive advertising can have on driving web engagement from the right people, at the right accounts. 
• Lookback Window: This is the period of time after an ad is viewed (but not clicked) within which a “conversion” or visit can be attributed, or matched, to the ad. Advertisers and attribution providers use lookback windows to determine if a specific ad view influenced a user’s decision to visit the website, or complete a conversion event.

What information is included in the report? 

On the Conversion page, you’ll first see a graph that plots both conversions and visits across a designated reporting date range. Updating the date range will update both the graph view, and the information table below.

The exact number of conversions/visits that occurred each day will be indicated above the graph bars, and can also be viewed by hovering your mouse over the graph. The zoom bar, located just above the graph, can also be adjusted to show activity groupings based on days, weeks, or months.

Once you have completed setup, we will also provide a detailed report showing view through-visits and conversion events that occurs. By default, the table will show view-through visits and conversions, but the table can also be filtered by either visits or conversions. Additionally, users can search for specific accounts and URLs at the top of the table.

The following metrics will be visible in the reporting table:

• Account: The account the visit/conversion came from, as determined by Terminus’s Visitor ID script.
• Conversion Type: Used to distinguish between View-Through Visits and Conversions.
• URL: For View-through Visits, the URL is the first page visited in the visit session. For View-Through Conversions, this is the conversion page that was visited.
• Tactic(s): Shows advertising tactics where an impression was served within the lookback period.
• Days to Conversion - Last Touch: The number of days between the last time an ad was viewed and the respective visit/conversion was recorded.
• Date: When the visit or conversion event was recorded.

View-Through Visit & View-Through Conversion Table View

Where can I access this information in the Terminus platform?

In Ad Experiences you’ll see a “Conversions” tab on the Campaign Overview page:

In the Tactic Details Page, you'll also find a Conversions tab that shows tactic-specific visit and conversion activity.

What Questions Can This Report Help Answer?

As an ABM marketer, we understand that you still need to show direct ROAS (return on advertising spend) in a way that is more concrete than holistic pipeline results. Tracking view-through visits and conversions at the tactic and account level lets you tie your ad spend back to specific high-value actions such as high-fit accounts visiting your website for the first time, or filling out a demo request form.

This report can help you answer questions like:

• How many people from my targets accounts came back to my website after seeing Terminus ads? 
• Are visitors from my target accounts converting at a higher rate after seeing Terminus ads?
• Have my advertising efforts influenced pipeline and revenue in my key segments? 
• Can we justify our advertising spend, based on the influenced pipeline and revenue attributed?

FAQs

Can I also see view-through visits and conversions for Linkedin-integrated and Global tactics within Terminus?

• No; currently this report will only show view-through activity for cookie-based display.
  

Will I be able to see retroactive view through visits/conversions, after I complete this setup?

• No; visits/conversions will only be tracked from the time your landing page URLs have been input into the Terminus setup interface.

Why don’t the account names in my View-Through Conversion report match the Account Names in Visitor ID reports? 

• The view-through conversions report is based on cookie-level data, which is where the Account Name is identified from. Visitor ID, on the other hand, is based on a reverse-IP lookup, so it is possible that there may be some variation in account names between the two reports.

Why doesn't every click on my ad result in a respective site visit or VTV?

• It depends entirely on the circumstances of the device that visited the website at the time of the click event, but there are several reasons why this may occur:
  • The device was using a network that Terminus Visitor ID was not able to identify.
  • The device had a blocker preventing our script from tracking them upon landing on the webpage (such as script blocker).
  • The user did not consent to having their visit tracked after landing on the webpage.
  • The user's device ran into a miscellaneous network issue that prevented the visit from tracking. E.g. the page was not able to finish loading or they had a connection problem at the time.
  • User unintentionally clicks an ad, but closes the browser before the tracking script is fired.
  • User saw an ad on one device, but visited the website via another device.

Why am I seeing accounts with conversions in VTC reports, but no visits in Visitor ID?

There are two main reasons why these wouldn't match up: 

• 1) The account in question doesn't have an IP address in our lookup database
• 2) The account conversion occurred from a device not on the corporate ID. Because conversions are cookie based, we may not see them in Visitor ID

Do view-through visits and conversions share the same lookback window?

• Yes.
  

What if I accidentally input a URL with a typo, or a URL that is no longer live?

• Our system has front end validation built in that will check to make sure URLs are valid or not. You will receive an error message in the Terminus UI if you input a URL that is not valid.

Can Terminus’s view-through tracking capture conversions that occur on custom javascript - for example, a pop-up notification?

• No, we do not support tracking on javascript today.

Can I track conversions that occur on a 3rd party or partner site? 

• Currently we are only able to track activity on domains that you own (re: that you are able to place our Visitor ID script on), and have been whitelisted in the Terminus system.

Can I track conversions that occur on pages hosted by a 3rd party landing page site?

• Yes; if you can install the VID script on the site (or hosting site), and it’s a white labeled domain, we can track activity on those pages.

I understand that Terminus’s reporting for view-throughs is only at the account level. How can I determine who the person that visited/completed the conversion action is?

• Terminus provides the date the visit/conversion happened so you can easily cross-reference activity that occurred on that same day within Terminus Data Studio, or your marketing automation platform/CRM. For example, in Data Studio you could navigate to the account-specific page, and match interactions on that account on the date the conversion/visit happened to draw deeper conclusions about who the converting/visiting individual might have been.