Setting up Adwords Conversion Tracking with Adobe DTM

Quick post this week on how to fire Conversion tags (Adwords, Facebook, etc) with Adobe’s DTM.

For those who do not know this, DTM is the default tag manager solution adobe offers alongside Omniture. It used to be called “Satellite” and was part of a marketing agency called Search Discovery.

Adobe acquired the company years ago and offer that particular solution as a default/out of the box TMS for Adobe SiteCatalyst implementation.
Funnily enough they haven’t changed the name of the tag yet, it still holds its original name:

While firing a conversion pixel is a very easy task – especially with Google Tag manager where the relevant templates are pre-built for you – recent discussions made me realise that there is a lack of knowledge around DTM, mostly due to Google Tag Manager templates (and popularity) that makes the whole process easy, so I hope this post help some of you. Below are the three steps you need to take in order to fire a conversion pixel via DTM.

Step 1: Create a new Page Load Rule

There are three different Rules you can choose in DTM. Event based, Page load and Direct Call rules. Conversion pixel needs to fire when the user reaches the “thank you” page, thus you would want this to happen on page load. Go to the Page Load Rule tab on the left hand side and click “Create New Rule”.

Step 2: Add the Firing Rule (Conditions)

With Adobe DTM, you have a list from which you can choose what conditions should be fulfilled in order to fire your tag.

The most common conditions are:

• URL based Conditions – Domain, Subdomain, query string, etc
• Technology Conditions – Device type, browser size, etc (example: rule = only mobile)
• Channel and Onsite Conditions – Time on site, Landing page, success event, etc
• Various Data Conditions – such as an element from your data layer (for example setting in DTM PropXYZ = %Successful Checkout%, where %Successful Checkout% is a data element that picks up the value from data layer on your “thank you” page). If you go with this one make sure its a unique value as you wouldn’t want to fire your conversion pixel randomly.

My suggestion is to go with a URL based condition. Within the new page load rule, click on Conditions – first accordion tab in DTM – then click under “Rule Conditions” the Criteria button.

Select “Path” and add your /thank you/ page as shown below. Do not forget to activate Regex (green).

Make sure you do not leave your PATH empty. If you set no condition on page load rules and accidentally publish the tag, then the particular tag will fire on all pages that DTM is installed.

Once you have done both these steps, you have a page load tag that will execute on your thank-you page.

Step 3: Setting up your actions, Copy paste the AdWords Conversion Pixel

Scroll down to the bottom of the tag and select Javascript / Third Party Tags. There click on Sequential Javascript (synchronous) and then on the “Add new script button”.

Once you’ve done that an editor will open. Copy paste your AdWords pixen and give your tag a name you will remember “Adwords Conversion Tag”

Save and debug, then publish. Your tag is now live.

You can use the same tag to fire other conversion pixels by simply creating a new third party tag script since the rule is now set on the ThankYou page. This practise however is not advised as you might have to switch budgets and/or pause campaigns so having all tags in one place might be a pain further down the line.

Disclaimer: Some people will advise Sequential HTML instead of JS. There are numerous cases where this didn’t work however you can try both if you wish.