Understanding Conversion Tracking

What conversion tracking measures

Conversion tracking compares the purchase rate of two groups: visitors who saw at least one Activly notification during their session, and visitors who did not. The difference between these two rates is your lift — the measurable impact your notifications are having on purchases.

This is the closest you can get to measuring ROI directly from Activly without running a formal A/B experiment.

Requirements

Conversion tracking requires a connected e-commerce integration. Activly needs access to both notification view data and order data from the same session in order to match them.

Supported integrations:

Shopify (direct integration)
WooCommerce (plugin or webhook method)

Stripe, Zapier, and webhook integrations do not currently support conversion tracking because they push payment events without the corresponding session data needed for attribution.

How it works

When a visitor lands on your site and sees a notification, Activly sets a session cookie in their browser. This cookie records that the visitor was exposed to at least one notification.

If that visitor then completes a purchase within the attribution window (24 hours by default), the order is counted as a conversion attributed to notification exposure. Activly matches the cookie data to the incoming order event from your Shopify or WooCommerce integration.

Visitors who never see a notification — because of page targeting, session frequency limits, or because notifications are disabled on certain pages — form the unexposed group. Their purchase rate is tracked separately as the baseline.

Reading the conversion report

The conversion report is available in Analytics → Conversions. It shows:

Exposed conversion rate — the percentage of visitors who saw a notification and then completed a purchase
Unexposed conversion rate — the percentage of visitors who did not see a notification and completed a purchase
Lift — the difference between the two rates, expressed in percentage points and as a relative multiplier. This is your core ROI signal.

A positive lift means visitors who saw your notifications purchased at a higher rate than those who did not.

Attribution window

The default attribution window is 24 hours — if a visitor sees a notification and purchases within 24 hours, the conversion is attributed to the exposure. You can extend this to 7 days in Settings → Conversion Tracking → Attribution Window.

A longer window captures more conversions but may reduce the signal quality, since visitors who take several days to decide are less likely to have been directly influenced by a single notification view.

An important caveat

The lift metric shows correlation, not causation. Visitors who engage with or respond to purchase notifications may already have higher purchase intent than the average site visitor — they may be more product-aware, comparison-shopping, or closer to a buying decision regardless of the notification.