How to Set Up and Use Conversion Tracking in ManyChat
After getting ManyChat into the hands of hundreds of thousands of marketers and business owners, we were happy to see all the creative ways that people use the product.
We found a wide range of priorities and needs across different size teams, but one consistent need is tracking conversions. Tracking key actions is useful to both agencies and small to medium-size businesses. The most common implementation, automatically pushing lead information to Google sheets and getting real-time notifications, were extremely valuable to improve productivity and reduce costs.
A handful of useful conversations later, we learned the easiest way to track conversions inside your ManyChat bot.
Here’s how it works.
What is conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking is connecting your marketing activities to the results that they generate. It’s a conversion rate optimization best practice companies increase the number of leads that take an action — whether they book an appointment, sign up for your SMS campaign, call your business, or purchase a product. It takes time and money to build out your bot flows and manage Facebook Ads, so you want to measure the results of your efforts and evaluate what works and what doesn’t.
This helps you answer questions like:
- Is my lead generation flow working?
- Where can I make improvements?
- Who are my most valuable customers?
- Which promotions and offers work best?
There many ways to set up conversion tracking in ManyChat. Some advanced approaches use Zapier to push information out to a CRM. For example, a HubSpot integration may be a great way to manage all marketing and sales-related activities from your bot. This is more geared towards professional services and other businesses that have a long sales cycle.
Actionable conversion tracking with deeper insights and goals.
Conversion tracking inside ManyChat gives you the ability to record individual actions at key moments in your bot flows. This enables marketers to understand the reasons people convert, so they can work on improving messaging and the quality of service delivered.
After you bring a user into your flow, for example, from a paid ad or ManyChat Growth Tool, you can watch and record their interactions by setting action blocks within your flow. This helps you visualize and track progress to hit your conversion goals.
Creating a “record lead” action block.
Action blocks are extremely powerful inside of ManyChat. They help record information on people who convert. In the flow above, you’ll notice an action block is placed right after a user clicks to book an appointment.
Whether a user comes in from paid or organic flows is less important. You can have different growth tools go to clones of the same flow, but changing the “lead” tag to “paid lead” and “organic lead” respectively. It’s just as easy to filter for both tags, and you’ll be able to see where most of your conversions are coming from. The goal is to place an action block after conversion points so you can register information.
To set up a post-conversion action block, you should create the following:
- Add tag. In this case, you want to tag all users who pass through this part of the sequence as “lead”.
- Set Custom Field [1] Increase “service 1” request by 1. This helps you keep track of who’s committed to one specific service. You can have multiple inside your ManyChat bot. It also lets you know how many times a customer requested a particular service and which ones they prefer. Say you own a massage parlor. You’d want to know if a person is repeatedly booking foot, back, or head massage. Note: “service 1” can represent any number of business or personal service (training, haircut, yoga, etc.)
- Set Custom Field [2] Last “service 1” request by date/time of action. This updates the last time a user booked an appointment for service 1. It automatically refreshes each time they click-through.
- Set Custom Field [3] Increase total service request by 1. This helps you keep track of all services requested across your bot. For example, if you or your client are a beauty salon, you can see how many times someone booked any of your services, including hair, nails, massage, etc. It helps determine the overall value of a specific subscriber.
- Set Custom Field [4] Last service request by date/time of the action. This helps you keep track of all services requested across your bot. For example, if you or your client are a beauty salon, you can know how many times someone booked any of your services, including hair, nails, massage, etc.
- Mark conversation as open. This action places the conversation in Live Chat’s “open conversation folder. It’s great for those who want to jump into Live Chat to send a personal message. ManyChat’s mobile app lets you continue the conversation in real-time from your phone.
This is important if you are not using Calendly or another scheduling service. You will need to confirm the appointment manually.
- Notify admin. Many business owners like to know what’s going on during a campaign. This action will ping you or your client when a lead converts.
- Set Custom Field [5] Increase lead value by X. Set this as the price of product or service a user has committed to. This will help you find the customers who spend the most in your business so you offer special promotions and deals.
Say you’re doing a look back on a year’s worth of Chat Marketing campaigns. Using the Record Lead action block, you can see who are repeat customers, the services they’ve booked, and how much they’ve spent. Note, this process only works if you have a limited number of services.
For shorter periods of time, you can use the “Last request” blocks to determine ROI on a specific campaign (assuming that person doesn’t book again at a date outside of the campaign).
When using this method, you can break down this mega action block into two different blocks depending on what you consider important actions. The goal is to use a series of tags and custom fields to help define when someone is interested in your product or service and commits to a lead sequence or appointment booking.
Collecting lead information.
After you create an action block, you want to collect lead information like phone number and email. It can be done in two different ways.
One, free keyboard input to Google Sheet. And two, through Calendly.
The flow below requires Google Sheets to record data:
These “User Input” blocks collect emails and phone numbers. You can easily build one in your own flow.
Using Calendly or another scheduling service is just as easy.
This block uses Calendly to set the appointment. When someone clicks the button, you can set a custom field “Appointments Booked” to increase by one.
Later you can use this custom field to find top clients in your audience based on how many appointments they’ve made through your bot.
Managing lead information.
Now maybe you saw in our million Conversations 2019 releases we have a Google Sheets “update row” function. No longer are we stuck with a new row created each time new information comes in.
You want to use Google Sheets to:
- Update row for a single total value of a subscriber
- Add row to see their participation in each campaign period.
- Both can be used in conjunction with Google sheets formulas to calculate things like ROI.
To set up your Google Sheets update row, read our Google Sheets Integration support article.
What this means for your business.
No two businesses are marketed equally.
Some are heads-down, working to book appointments for clients or get foot traffic through coupons. While others are persuading leads to buy a product online. All teams need a way to record and manage leads. Conversion tracking is one of the most flexible methods for any marketer or a business owner.
Let’s cover a few use cases you can apply to you or your clients’ business.
Local businesses.
Say you or your client is a beauty salon and you’re running a Click to Messenger ad campaign for different services. To encourage newcomers to book an appointment, you’re offering a discount. They click your ad, give you their information and book a time, then receive a coupon — this is their commitment. They are a lead.
You can place a dollar value depending on the price of the service they commit to. Each time a person books an appointment with a service, their lead value goes up. You can track the running total of money spent, then offer personalized promotions to express appreciation for their loyalty and encourage return visits.
Coupon redemptions.
Many businesses use coupons to get new customers in the door. If you use coupons that need to be redeemed in-store, you can use a keyword trigger to record total customer value.
For instance, say you are a restaurant and the coupon code is “happytaco10”. You can set a keyword trigger for “happytaco10” so when someone uses the coupon, they enter a flow. This flow will consist of an action block to record the value of the coupon, and maybe a ‘thank you’ message for good measure.
When a diner redeems the coupon with their cashier or server, the keyword magic happens. You don’t need to keyword the code, that just tells the cashier what discount to give. The Cashier needs to enter “Happy10 Redeemed” and then the bot should prompt for a User-Input block requesting the total cart value. This then gets saved to a Gsheet, custom field, and/or added to the user’s lead value. You can capture the data and use it to determine your promotional campaigns ROI.
eCommerce businesses.
Making the final purchase in Messenger is still new for consumers, but better with our new Paypal integration — there’s more trust, less entering of credit card numbers. If you want to track lead value for customers, you can create an action block when they click a link to buy on your website. You should assign what you expect the final cart value to be before checkout, multiplied by (1 minus the average cart abandonment rate). When a lead passes through this block, their lead value will increase by the number you set it to.
Professional services.
Agencies and other professional service companies can use conversion tracking to capture lead information, determine if leads are worth following up on or not, and conversion. A lot of success if figuring out where to best focus your time. You can capture conversion moments in bot flow, or link out to an outside CRM provider to host your information.
Get your own conversion tracking template today
While this conversion tracking template works right out of the box for Pro accounts, it’s adaptable. All you have to do is update “service 1” and etc. to whatever they are selling. You have the power to add lead scoring, create custom fields for whatever you care about, and set your own definition of conversion in your bot flows.
For more on conversion tracking in ManyChat, we recommend you read “Product Update: ManyChat Analytics, Conversion Tracking, and the ManyChat Pixel“.