Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR)

TLDR

• The Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR) can automatically recover conversions that are otherwise lost by payment gateway redirect or similar issues.
• ACR has been invented and developed by the team behind the Pixel Manager.
• No other tracking code manager has this feature.

What is Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR)?

Through numerous support requests in the past years, we have discovered that in some cases payment gateways can deteriorate the conversion tracking. This is especially true for payment gateways that redirect the user to a third-party website to complete the payment.

While the Pixel Manager achieves 100% tracking accuracy for statistics and ad platforms that offer a server-to-server tracking method (such as Google Analytics Measurement Protocol and Facebook CAPI), all other platforms that only offer a client-side tracking method (such as Google Ads) can severely be affected by this issue. Every bidding algorithm that relies on client-side tracking will not perform optimally if the conversion tracking is not 100% accurate.

Payment gateways are not always the only culprit. Sometimes slow servers cause issues or in other cases, user browsing behavior prevent conversions to be tracked.

First we developed ways to track if and when conversions are lost. As a result we launched the Payment Gateway Accuracy report earlier this year. It shows in detail how many conversions are lost for each active payment gateway.

In average, over all shops that we have data on, the payment gateway accuracy is just 84%. This is very low and means that 16% of all conversions are lost!

Then we thought about ways to recover these lost conversions. This led to the development of a new feature that we now call Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR).

The Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR) detects when a conversion is lost and automatically recovers the conversion where possible.

How does ACR work?

In the first step, the ACR detects when a conversion is lost. This is done by comparing the conversion data that is available in the WooCommerce order with the conversion data that the Pixel Manager tracks for each order. ACR doesn't simply include all orders in the analysis. For instance, it won't include failed orders because this would make the result artificially worse than it really is.

Once the ACR has determined that the client-side conversion pixels have not fired on a specific order, that order is marked.

In a second step, the ACR tries to recover the conversion. This is done by detecting if the customer of an order with a missing conversion is re-visiting the shop. If such a customer is re-visiting the shop, ACR will retrieve the order data and fire the conversion pixels again, no matter which page the customer is visiting.

Also, ACR will apply more strict rules if a conversion should be recovered. It will only fire the conversion if the order is in a paid state.

How to set up ACR?

ACR is only available in the premium version of the Pixel Manager and is automatically enabled by default. You can simply lean back, take a sip from your freshly brewed coffee and let ACR do its job.

The premium version of the Pixel Manager is available over here: Pixel Manager Pro

How well does ACR work?

Our early tests have shown that Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR) can recover between 30% and up to 65% of lost conversions. These are very good results, considering that the ACR is a completely automatic process.

The ACR works especially well on shops where paying customers are re-visiting the shop soon after the purchase.

This also means that every incentive that you as a shop manager have in place, that will bring back the customer to the shop, will also help the ACR to recover more conversions. Such an incentive can be an email with a discount code or a follow-up email with a link to leave a review on the shop.

Future of ACR

We started the public beta of ACR in the summer of 2022 and we are still learning. We are surprised how well its fully automated conversion recovery already works on some shops. But, that is not a reason for us to stop inventing. We are already working on improvements that will help increase the conversion recovery rate even further.

Documentation

Head over to our documentation to learn more about the Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR): Automatic Conversion Recovery (ACR)