Your partners need third-party tracking, but what is it?

You may have heard requests from your publishers, ad brokers and other partners that they need third-party tracking or shared tracking. If you’re clueless as to what that is, this article is for you.

What on earth is third-party tracking?

When we speak of third-party tracking, we are referring to the point when an external tracking application is triggered via your analytics platform. In most cases, this external tracking system will be used by the partners on your platform.

Why is it important?

Your partners can have good reasons to work with their own tracking systems. Some common reasons are:

• To track customer behavior
  Third-party tracking transmits data about the behavior of potential customers on the advertiser’s website. For example, what products is someone looking at? Did the customers search for specific offers or browse the shop categories? This is particularly interesting for retargeting purposes.
• To measure the success of their advertising campaigns
  Third-party tracking allows partner to collect information on the customer journey automatically. They can use this information to optimize their own advertising campaigns, for example in search engines.
• To distribute data on transactions to their own partners or affiliates
  Third-party tracking makes use of JavaScript to read information from the confirmation page after a sale takes place, and perhaps reorder this information and add additional elements. This is commonly used in post-transaction marketing, where partners automatically recommend related offers to the customers after purchase. Partners can also use third-party tracking to ensure that they do not target customers for products they have already bought.

All in all, thanks to third-party tracking, businesses can enrich their tracked data with additional information about the customers and the transactions, in order to optimize their marketing strategy for better output.

To learn about third-party tracking and its benefits in greater depth, click here to view our short informative video!