A step by step look at what happens to a conversion, from the moment a visitor lands on your website to the moment it reaches your ad platforms and analytics tools.
There's a lot that happens between someone clicking one of your ads and a conversion showing up in Google Ads, Meta, GA4 etc.
This article walks through that process step by step. Each step includes a short summary of what happens, along with a link to a more detailed article if you want to dig deeper into how it works.
The journey of a conversion
Step 1: Click IDs are captured when the visitor arrives
The Converly tracking code sits in the <head> of every page on your website. When someone clicks one of your ads, the ad platform adds a click ID to the end of the URL they land on (like ?gclid= for Google Ads or ?fbclid= for Meta).
The Converly tracking code reads these click IDs, along with any campaign parameters (like utm_source and utm_campaign) and the page the visitor first landed on, and stores them in first-party cookies in the visitor's browser. That way they're still available when the visitor converts, even if that's on a different page or a later visit.
You can read more about this in our articles on The tracking script and Click IDs.
Step 2: The conversion is detected
When the visitor submits a form, books a meeting or starts a chat, Converly detects it. But it only records a conversion once the tool confirms it was actually successful.
How that success is detected depends on the tool you're using. Some tools send a postMessage event when a form is successfully submitted and we listen for that, where for others we need to watch for a visible element on the page to appear.
You can read more about this in our article on Conversion detection.
Step 3: The lead's details are gathered
Once a conversion is detected, Converly gathers all the data it needs to send the conversion to your ad platforms and analytics tools.
It first gathers the lead's name, email, phone, etc as they are needed by ad platforms for advanced matching. In some cases those details are read straight from the form on the page, or from the success message the tool sends when the form is submitted. For some tools the details aren't available on the page at all, so Converly fetches them from the tool directly (usually via an API call) shortly afterwards.
Once the lead's details have been gathered, they combined with the click IDs and campaign parameters that were saved in the visitor's browser back in Step 1, along with other browser data like the Google Analytics client ID. And when the conversion reaches our servers, the visitor's IP address, user agent and country are added too.
You can read more about this in our articles on Conversion detection and Click IDs.
Step 4: The conversion is sent to our servers and saved
The Converly tracking code you place on your website then sends the conversion to our servers. We check that it came from one of the website domains on your account, work out which of your flows it belongs to, and save it to our database before doing anything else.
Saving the conversion first is important. It means a slow or unavailable ad platform can never cause a conversion to be lost, because we already have it safely stored and can keep trying to send it.
You can read more about this in our articles on Delivery and Security and access.
Step 5: Duplicates are caught
It's surprisingly easy for a conversion to be reported more than once. A form tool might announce a successful submission twice, a visitor's connection might drop so their browser sends the conversion again, or the same conversion might reach an ad platform from both your pixel and our servers.
Rather than happening in one single step, Converly catches duplicates at several points along the way (in the browser, on our servers, and in the ad platform itself), so each conversion only ever counts once.
You can read more about this in our article on Deduplication.
Step 6: The conversion is prepared for each platform
Every ad platform wants the lead's details in a slightly different format. Converly formats the lead's name, email, phone, etc the way each platform expects, hashes them where the platform requires it, and picks the click IDs and browser identifiers that platform accepts.
This happens separately for each platform, just before the conversion is sent, so every platform gets its data in exactly the format it needs to match the conversion to an ad click.
You can read more about this in our article on Normalization and hashing.
Step 7: The conversion is delivered
Converly then sends the conversion to each of your ad platforms and analytics tools. Each one is sent independently, so a problem with one platform never stops the conversion reaching the others.
If a send fails for a temporary reason (like the ad platform being down), it's retried automatically. And if a conversion can't be delivered, it's marked as failed and you are notified (rather than just quietly disappearing).
You can read more about this in our articles on Delivery and Setup, including the checks Converly runs to make sure your ad platform accounts are set up to receive conversions.
Seeing what happened
Every conversion that Converly captures is recorded in your conversion log, along with the exact data we captured.
Each conversion has a status (like completed, partial or failed) that tells you at a glance whether it was delivered successfully, and you can zoom in every destination and see what data that was sent, the exact API calls that were made, error messages, and more.
You can read more about this in our articles on Event log and Statuses and errors.
Personal data
Converly is careful with the lead's personal data at every step. If a visitor's browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, nothing is captured at all. Sensitive fields on forms (like passwords and card numbers) are always skipped before their value is even read. Contact details are hashed before being sent to platforms that require it, and raw contact details are only kept for a limited time (for debugging purposes) before they're erased.
You can read more about this in our article on Personal data.
Security and access
Similarly, security isn't a single step. Conversions are only accepted from the website domains you specify on your account, messages sent by form tools are validated before they're trusted, and your ad platform credentials are stored in an encrypted vault.
You can read more about this in our article on Security and access.