Sales Tracker: Monitor the value of your chats

The Sales Tracker can show you which chats, agents and products have the biggest impact on your revenue. Add the Sales Tracker to your ecommerce store and see how the revenue grows with LiveChat!

Sales Tracker is a piece of code that tracks which chats end with sales. You add it to a page that passes a sale property, for example, your post-purchase ‘Thank you’ page.

Whenever a customer who has chatted with you reaches that page, the Sales Tracker will pick up on it and attribute that chat with the sale’s value. This way, you know exactly which chats led to which purchases.

The tracker is designed specifically to measure sales. If you’re looking for a solution that ties custom events happening on your website with specific chats, check out our goals system. Or benefit from both at the same time!

The tracker is designed specifically to measure sales. If you’re looking for a solution that ties custom events happening on your website with specific chats, check out our goals system. Or benefit from both at the same time!

How to install a Sales Tracker

To start tracking the value of your chats, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Sales Tracker settings and click on the Add a new Sales Tracker button.

2. Next up, you need to name your Sales Tracker. Pick a name you’ll be able to easily recognize later on in your Archives and Reports.

3. You will need to pick a tracking method – the way the Sales Tracker will attribute chats with sales. There are three to choose from:
1. Fixed: Each registered purchase is worth the same. This works well if you’re selling a single product or if you want to set separate trackers for different products. No matter the purchase value, the chat will be credited the same, set amount every time.
2. Dynamic: The order value is captured from your website code whenever a customer makes a purchase. This works well when implemented in your ecommerce cart. Every time a customer finalizes a purchase, the tracker will grab information like order value on the fly.
3. Non-monetary: Choose this tracking method if you don’t want to assign any specific value to a chat but you still want to tie the purchase property to the conversation. This can be useful for calculating conversion levels.

When you choose the dynamic option, you also need to let LiveChat know which global variable contains the information about the order. If the variable is not present in your code, LiveChat won’t be able to pick up on it. If you don’t know how to do this, get your website developer involved.

The value you pass should be in the following format: 1000.99 – a point as the decimal mark, no thousands separator, no currency information (that will be passed separately).

When you choose the dynamic option, you also need to let LiveChat know which global variable contains the information about the order. If the variable is not present in your code, LiveChat won’t be able to pick up on it. If you don’t know how to do this, get your website developer involved.

The value you pass should be in the following format: 1000.99 – a point as the decimal mark, no thousands separator, no currency information (that will be passed separately).

4. When choosing either Fixed or Dynamic, you will also get a chance to pick the currency in which the sale will be reported.

5. No matter which method of tracking you pick, you also get the option to add an order ID parameter to the chat.

If you decide to include the order ID parameter, you will need to point to an order ID parameter property in your website code (similar to the dynamic tracking method). If you don’t know how to do this yourself, please contact your website developer.

If you decide to include the order ID parameter, you will need to point to an order ID parameter property in your website code (similar to the dynamic tracking method). If you don’t know how to do this yourself, please contact your website developer.

6. After you’ve chosen a tracking method, you need to specify how long the tracker should be active for. By default, it’s set to 30 days. This means that any purchase made within 30 days of a chat will credit the chat.

7. Click on Generate sales tracker code to complete the creation process.

8. If everything checks out, copy the tracker code to clipboard and paste it before the ending tag on the post-purchase ‘Thank you’ page.

After the last step is completed, all the sales made on the page coming after a specific chat will credit the chat. This way, you can learn how much money a specific product makes and how big of a contribution your LiveChat is to your bottom line.

The purchase information is available in Archives for all chats that ended with a successful sale (they will be marked with a shopping cart icon). You can also track the results of all purchases in the Sales Tracker report.

Please note that both the LiveChat code and the Sales Tracker code need to be added to a page for the Sales Tracker to work.

How Sales Tracker works in practice

Here’s an example scenario that should give you a better idea of how the Sales Tracker works.

Let’s say that you have an online store. You want to see how big of an impact LiveChat makes on your revenue so you decide to use the Sales Tracker.

You start by adding it to your purchase confirmation page to capture order details and tie them to specific chats.

To do that, you go to the Sales Tracker settings page, create a new Sales Tracker (step 1), name it (step 2), and choose the Dynamic tracking method (step 3).

The Dynamic method requires a variable that represents order value. It is a code line present in your shop’s files that associates carts with products and prices. You fill the Value parameter field with that same code line that is present in your website’s code.

You choose to have the purchases reported in US dollars so you pick that currency next to the Value parameter field (step 4).

You also want to display an order ID in a chat details column to quickly access customers’ order information. You fill the Order ID parameter field with a parameter taken from your website’s code. The parameter you’re looking for is a code line responsible for assigning ID numbers to specific orders made by your store users (step 5).

Finally, you choose to count sales made after up to 10 days of their related chats (step 6). This means that each sale made within 10 days of a chat will credit that specific chat, showing a cart icon in chat archives. It will also contribute to your sales report score.

The tracker is now ready for implementation (step 7). You add it to your store’s thank-you page to capture sales data (step 8).

Any custom modifications of the LiveChat tracking code can potentially cause issues with the Sales Tracker. Stick to the default version to make sure tracking works smoothly.

Now, let’s say that a customer buys your merchandise after a chat. You will be able to see that order information and value in the chat Archives. It will also show up in the Sales Tracker report in the Reports section.

Bear in mind that one chat can lead to multiple sales. This can result in a situation where you have more sales than chats listed in the Sales Tracker report.

Bear in mind that one chat can lead to multiple sales. This can result in a situation where you have more sales than chats listed in the Sales Tracker report.

If the Sales Tracker is giving you any trouble, feel free to chat with us and we’ll help you set it up!

Tracking sales on a dynamic page

If you have a website that is loaded dynamically (for example, on one page) and you don’t have the order information immediately, you can still use a Sales Tracker.

Let’s say that you have an order form where a customer makes a purchase. You can make a request that will return a LiveChat JS API method updating the Sales Tracker in the response.

Here’s an example of how you can do it. Let’s say you have a request that is made whenever a customer makes an order similar to this:

$.ajax({
    "type" : "post",
    "url" : "/api/signup",
    "data" : $filledForm.serialize(),
    "dataType" : "json",
    "success" : function(data) {
        showConfirmation("ok");
    },
})

When the request succeeds, you get something like this with a confirmation that the request/order went through:

$('#myForm')
.ajaxForm({
    url: "/api/signup",
    dataType: 'json',
    success : function (response) {
        showConfirmation("success");
        LC_API && LC_API.trigger_sales_tracker('KcmbUeRo9eMIYyIynT8IMJeZiB4GuB9P', [
            {name: '__order_price', value: 999},
        ]);
    }
});

As you can see, this response comes with a request for the Sales Tracker:

LC_API && LC_API.trigger_sales_tracker('KcmbUeRo9eMIYyIynT8IMJeZiB4GuB9P', [
    {name: '__order_price', value: 999},
]);

It uses the LC JS API method trigger_sales_tracker that triggers the Sales tracker and credits any chats that led to the order.

When you add the callback in the response to your order, it will be tracked without having to rely on a ’thank-you’ page.