Diagnostics

Payment Gateway Tracking Accuracy Report

The Payment Gateway Accuracy Report shows how often customers reach the purchase confirmation page when buying a product.

Why is that important?

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Most tracking pixels use browser-based tracking libraries. So if the customers don’t visit the purchase confirmation page with their browser, then the libraries can’t load and thus can’t send the conversions back to the analysis (or ads) platform.

Especially for paid ads platforms, it is crucial that 100% of all conversions are being tracked properly because all bidding and budget decisions depend on how much revenue was tracked.

One would think that on a regular WooCommerce shop 100% of the customers reach the purchase confirmation page. But that, unfortunately, is not the case. Most shops in fact don’t track 100%. The numbers go down as low as below 50% of tracked purchases. And the biggest problem is that shop owners and campaign managers usually don’t get suspicious about the payment gateways and purchase confirmation pages as long as some conversions are being tracked. However, tracking only 70%, or 80% instead of 95% to 100% can make a huge difference on campaign performance and revenue.

That’s why we’ve implemented this report in the Pixel Manager to help you to better understand if there is a problem with tracking accuracy.

Typical causes

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In most cases, the tracking accuracy drops because a payment gateway doesn’t redirect properly to the purchase confirmation page. This is why this diagnostics report is called the Payment Gateway Tracking Accuracy Report. But there are other possible causes why customers don’t reach the purchase confirmation page. The following list shows some causes that we have come across so far:

Using an off-site payment gateway: The customer gets redirected to an off-site payment page, and after the purchase, the customer doesn’t get redirected back to the purchase confirmation page. This can happen when the redirect is not set up correctly, or when the customer interrupts the redirect.
The shop developer has set up a custom purchase confirmation page but isn’t using the proper WooCommerce hooks to do so.
The shop developer has used an incompatible plugin to customize the purchase confirmation page, which doesn’t use the proper WooCommerce hooks.
The shop is loading the purchase confirmation page too slowly and customers exit before they reach the purchase confirmation page.

Typical accuracy

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On reliable servers with high-quality payment gateways, we’ve seen tracking accuracy to be next to 100%. From our experience, tracking accuracy above 95% is easily achievable. So this is what you should aim for. Everything below should be considered a problem worth to be fixed.

In the tracking accuracy report, you will see a weighted total. If this is below 95% you should take action. The list of gateways is sorted by weight. Start from the top and start fixing those which are below 95%.

One payment gateway that usually gets tracking accuracy above 95% is the Stripe payment gateway. For us, this is the benchmark so far. But, we understand that it is not always possible to use this one. So make sure to monitor the diagnostics tab to find out if your payment gateways are deteriorating tracking accuracy.

Fixing the tracking accuracy

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In most cases, the cause of a deteriorated tracking accuracy is one or more payment gateways. Only use on-site payment gateways and try out different ones. We know that depending on which gateway you are using, commission rates can be different, and it might take time to find a high-quality payment gateway. If you are heavily investing in running ads then you must make sure that the tracking accuracy is high. Otherwise, you’re losing more money than you would be saving with a gateway that has a lower tracking accuracy and maybe slightly lower commissions.