Stripe Payment Links enable businesses to accept payments without embedding checkout directly on the site. While this feature streamlines the payment process, it introduces specific challenges for businesses striving to trace the source of the payments and subscriptions accurately.
Understanding the origin of each sale is paramount for optimizing marketing efforts and allocating resources effectively. Let's explore these challenges in greater detail, focusing on the primary issues related to tracking code placement and domain discrepancies, and how adding a tracking parameter to these links helps to track conversions.
Why Stripe Payment Links are hard to track?
There are several reasons making conversion tracking at Stripe Payment Links hard. Collectively, they make measurement of Stripe Payment Link conversions using simple measures such as GTM impossible.
Inability to Place Tracking Code on Stripe Checkout
A core challenge arises from the security measures and design of Stripe's hosted checkout system. For security reasons, Stripe does not allow businesses to place custom tracking codes or pixels directly on the checkout pages. This restriction is crucial for maintaining the integrity and security of the payment process but presents a significant hurdle for marketing attribution. Without the ability to embed tracking codes, measuring conversions and attributing sales to specific marketing activities accurately.
Relying on thank you page tracking solves this to an extent, but provides no visibility into repeat payments, trial account activations, and is issue-prone even for simple one-off payments due to reliance on cross-domain cookies.
Cross-Domain Tracking Issues
Another significant challenge is the fact that Stripe Checkout operates on a domain separate from the business's primary website. When a customer clicks a payment link and is redirected to complete their purchase on Stripe's domain, the shift can disrupt the continuity of tracking. This separation can lead to issues with tracking cookies, which are often used to follow a user's journey across sites. Cookies set by main website domain are not always accessible or consistently shared across different domains, and it may make it challenging to connect the dots between the initial click on a marketing ad and the final transaction on Stripe's checkout page.
Impact of Browser Privacy Features
Modern browsers have increasingly focused on enhancing user privacy, often implementing features that restrict the tracking of user activity across domains. These privacy features can further complicate cross-domain tracking by limiting access to cookies or other identifiers that are crucial for linking a user's action from the marketing source to the completion of a payment on Stripe. As a result, you might face underreporting of the conversions or inaccurate attribution of sales.
Solutions and Workarounds
Addressing these challenges requires to bypass the limitations of direct tracking code placement and domain discrepancies. One approach is to use server-side tracking mechanisms that can capture and attribute conversions without relying on client-side cookies or pixels. Note that server-side GTM server-side tracking still relies on client-side cookies and wouldn't be sufficient to track Stripe Payment Link conversions.
Using unique identifiers, appended as query parameters to Stripe Payment Links that can be tracked back to the source through server-side logic, offers a viable workaround. To successfully track server-side conversions, you must consider adopting first-party data strategies and exploring integrations or platforms capable of bridging the attribution gap between the initial engagement and the Stripe checkout process.
Able Customer Data Platform (CDP) provides a comprehensive solution for tracking Stripe Payment Link purchases and subscriptions back to the original visitor source. This article will explain how Able CDP enhances Stripe Payment Link tracking to provide you with actionable insights.
How Able CDP Tracks Stripe Payment Links
Able CDP uses a few key methods to attribute each Stripe Payment Link checkout (and following purchases) to the correct source:
- Client reference IDs: Able CDP automatically appends client reference IDs to your Stripe Payment Links. These IDs connect each payment to that customer's previous interactions on your website before they clicked the link.
- First-party tracking: By tracking UTM parameters, referral URLs, and landing pages with first-party cookies, Able CDP can reliably attribute transactions even if a customer uses the link on a different device or browser than the one where they originally found your link.
- Direct server-side tracking: Able CDP sends conversion data directly to its servers and your connected analytics and ad platforms. This server-side tracking avoids issues with browser-based pixels, like ad blockers or customers needing to complete checkout in the same session.
With these tracking methods, Able CDP connects Stripe Payment Link checkouts to the original traffic source and the customer's previous touchpoints on your website. You can then view this data in the Able CDP revenue report and your CRM, marketing, analytics, and ad platforms.
Setting Up Able CDP for Stripe Payment Link Tracking
Sign-up for an Able CDP account. Free trial account will be instantly created and you'll be redirected to the Able Dashboard, offering a step-by-step guide to set up Stripe Payment Link tracking.
Generate tracking code in the 'Get Code' section of Able Dashboard. The code will assign if necessary and track client reference id parameters to each Stripe Payment Link on your website.
Set up a webhook in Stripe Dashboard to send conversion events to Able. 'Add Service Integration' – 'Stripe' will contain step-by-step instructions on how to do so, as well as personalized webhook URL.
See sources of each Stripe payment in Able Dashboard revenue report or connect it to supported integrations such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Google Ads or TikTok, allowing to see source, value and contents of each purchase.
Conclusion
With Able CDP, you can finally get complete, reliable data on where your Stripe Payment Link transactions are coming from. Seeing the full customer journey behind each sale will help you invest in your best marketing channels and create better experiences for your customers.
The key things to keep in mind are:
- Able CDP uses multiple methods to robustly attribute each transaction to the right source
- You can see the sales source and customer journey data in Able CDP and your connected marketing and analytics tools
- Setting up Able CDP only takes a few steps to start gaining new insights into your Stripe Payment Link sales