What’s in the basket?

It is only natural that businesses want to find out what brings them more sales. In the online marketing world, technologies have been developed to collect data from the touchpoints in the customer journey, so marketers know which channels are more effective in impacting their customers’ purchase decisions.

But it would be rather myopic to stop there.

Businesses also need to know which products are being purchased, in which combination they are often bought, and which do not sell at all. This way, they can better maximize sales.

This is where basket tracking comes in.

 

What is basket tracking?

Basket tracking is an additional tracking method that collects and transmits more order-related data to a marketing platform.

When regular tracking is applied, the common order-related data received are the order value and the order number. However, with basket tracking, you will receive all data available in the shopping basket, such as the name, ID, brand, shopping category, quantity and price of the products purchased.

What’s more? When you apply basket tracking on the Ingenious Enterprise platform, your products can be allocated to tracking categories, which are used to sort products by their profit margins. Correspondingly, you can attach different levels of commission to these tracking categories, so that the commissions you pay out are adjusted to their respective margins.

 

What does basket tracking do for me?

Let’s say your business sells electronics. By knowing which products your customers are buying at one go, you will have much more possibilities to analyze and enhance your marketing performance. For instance, you can better optimize your product offering, enhance the website by making the most commonly bought items easily found or by suggesting related items, and optimizing the sale experience.

Additionally, laptops will have a very different sales funnel from network cables – and with a far smaller margin. If basket tracking is applied, you can allocate them to different tracking categories, such as ‘computing’ for the laptop and ‘accessories’ for the cable. In the partnership management tool, you can then assign 5% commission for the tracking category ‘computing’ and 10% for ‘accessories’. This way, whenever the products are bought, your defined commissions will be given to the partners who brought the sale of the respective products.

 

How does basket tracking work?

The data flow

When you apply basket tracking on Ingenious Enterprise, every transaction will contain one or more basket positions. Each represents a product ordered. If a customer can order multiple units of the same product, every basket position contains data related to the product, such as price, brand, shopping category, as well as the quantity.

The data is then transmitted via an additional tracking parameter, added to the conversion code on the confirmation page.

The rating of transactions

Say, a customer goes to an online fashion shop and places an order. He buys the same t-shirt twice, a pair of trousers and three pairs of yellow socks. On the platform, this order will be represented as one transaction, containing three basket positions. The value of the basket position is the price of each product multiplied by the quantity:

• t-shirt (quantity: 2, price: 20 EUR, position value: 40 EUR)
• trousers (quantity: 1, price 45 EUR, position value 45 EUR)
• yellow socks (quantity: 3, price: 5 EUR, position value 15 EUR)

Therefore, the total order value or the sum of all the values of the basket positions would be 100 EUR.

Now let’s say the t-shirts and trousers are allocated to the tracking category ‘high-end brands’ and the socks to the tracking category ‘accessories non-brand’, and you give 5% commission on the first tracking category and 10% commission on the second. This would mean the partner receives the following commission:

• t-shirt (5% commission on 40 EUR: 2,00 EUR)
• trousers (5% commission on 45 EUR: 2,25 EUR)
• yellow socks (10% commission on 15 EUR: 1,50 EUR)

In most cases, giving a fixed commission on top is recommendable.

Validation

Naturally, businesses can expect that some cancellations and refunds occur after the sale has taken place. On Ingenious Enterprise, you can validate at a basket position level, so you can ensure that the figures on your online marketing platform stays accurate and up-to-date.