User Tracking and Ad Attribution with Fragment URL

Use Case

As a corporate, or as a marketing team, when we spend money on a sponsored campaign to drive pet owners to our website and to book an appointment, we want to be able to track that user, through to a completed booking, on our website.

Solution

The Vetstoria widgets, and floating widgets, which are integrated to your website, can provide fragment urls, which details the booking step/stage, to the host websites page url.

This makes it easy, and reliable, for web admins and marketeers to implement tracking of these stages.

As these events are generated by the host website, this ensures that the user can remain attributed to any source campaign.

Fragment Format

The Vetstoria fragment format is made up of 3 components:

1. A consistent prefix to trigger events from.

2. Indication of the client type (returning vs new)

3. The Step the Pet Parent is on in the booking process

Prefix

The prefix of ‘vs-’ (short for Vetstoria) is a consistent that remains throughout the fragment URL. This can then be used as a ‘trigger’ for you to fire events when it appears in the URL.

Client Type Indicator

There are three types displayed:

Step Description

Completed Bookings

When a pet parent completes a booking, they are presented with the ‘Appointment Booked’ page confirming that a booking has been made, and depending on selections made during the booking process, the fragment url will have different detail

Conversion Fragments

You will want to target two types of ‘completed’ event as conversions:

Completed Booking ID

Additionally, at this point Vetstoria will also surface the ‘booking_id’ as a parameter, which you can then capture for further data mining through other services.

The booking_id is the same id that is exposed through the Vetstoria Corporate Reporting API, allowing you to get more detail about the pet parents and the booking and associated appointments that where scheduled as a result of the booking.

In the example image below, the Vetstoria booking was completed by a returning client (rc), and has a booking id of 12183.

Prerequisites

Widget Settings

Force Desktop View

This will ensure that users from mobile devices, will continue to interact with your widget on your website, rather than be redirected to a Vetstoria domain booking page. This means you will get more accuracy as all users then remain on your domain website.

This setting is also located in: Settings > Integration > Widget | Widget Attributes

Note Changing this setting will require an update to your widget code already on your website.
However, you can manually update your code on your website by checking the following two attributes and setting as follows:

data-auto-mobile-redirection="False" 
data-force-desktop-view="True"

Enabling the Fragment URL

To enable the setting, there are two settings which need to be enabled.

1. Log in to the Clinic Platform Admin Screens.

2. Navigate to Settings

3. Go to ‘Advanced Settings’

4. Select the tab ‘Tracking’

You’ll see two toggles here which both need to be enabled:

• Display Step URL

• Advanced Fragment Detail

Once enabled, click ‘Save Changes’ and the fragment URLs will immediately start showing.

Tracking Setup

Vetstoria is really good at scheduling appointments, but not so good when it comes to Analytics platforms. However, we do have some suggested setups which we know have worked for other customers.

We strongly suggest you identify what method will work best with your analytics platforms or engaging with someone who can help you.

• Implementing Fragment URL with Google Tag Manager