As you might now, Google is phasing out third-party cookies in 2024, to reduce cross-site tracking and focus on more privacy-friendly alternatives. You can read more about their initiative here: https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/blog/cookie-countdown-2023oct
This impacts the functionality of third-party cookies everywhere and if they stop working, it means many of your conversions will no longer be tracked by our old External Conversion Tracking method. Read this guide https://d.pr/DkEpW7 to find out more about the new implementation as well as migration from the old method to the new one.
Instapage lets you track the visit to a Thank You page as a conversion so that you can still see conversions in our platform even if you are not using a native form. If you use a third-party embedded form on an Instapage page, you will receive the leads in your platform, but you will not see any conversions or leads in Instapage. By using the external page tracking option from this article, you can track conversions that happen that way as well.
If you have an Experiment (A/B test) running on the landing page, external page conversion tracking will accurately attribute the conversions to the variation that the visitor has seen, just like regular on-page conversion tracking.
NOTE: In order for the tracking to work properly, both the landing page and the thank you page on which you're adding the code snippet, need to have the same protocol (either http:// or https://).
The visitor's browser must also not block 3rd party cookies because our external tracking works via cookies. Some browsers have this option enabled by default. Chrome also has this option, in some cases, enabled by default. This is controlled only from the browser of the visitor. (You can find a reference screenshot from Chrome's settings here: https://d.pr/i/KndnJv).
Important notes:
1. You cannot have both internal and external conversion tracking enabled for a page at the same time. They are mutually exclusive. Make sure that you leave the External page checkbox enabled when you save and leave the page.
2. The external conversion tracking works based on visits to the thank you page. It only counts unique visits, so the same person cannot cause a conversion twice. It is limited to convert once every 7 days (the cookie has an expiration time of 7 days).
3. You can use external conversion scripts from multiple Instapage pages on a single Thank You page. This will not trigger a conversion on all of the pages. A conversion is tracked if a visit is registered from the same user on both the original page and the Thank You page in a certain time span. Unless the visitor visited two of the pages that you added code from, the conversion will not be triggered on both.
4. If you have the necessary coding knowledge, you can attempt to modify the code and insert it into the external form's callback function. That way, you could trigger the conversion when the form is submitted instead of when a Thank You page visit happens. Please note that our support team is unable to assist with coding or with troubleshooting this implementation method if it does not work.
5. There are some browser settings that will block our external conversion tracking if they are not turned off, when the landing page domain is not the same as the thank you page domain. In Google Chrome it is called Block third-party cookies, in Safari it is called Prevent cross-site tracking, and in Mozilla Firefox there are the Strict settings and the Do not track setting in the "Privacy & Security" section. This might cause some visitors' conversions to not be tracked, as these settings are local to their own browsers and cannot be controlled by us.
6. If you are going to use Chrome's incognito mode to test the external conversion tracking, make sure you disable this checkbox when you open the window: