Basically, it works on something that’s already built into Ontraport. If you went into your Admin panel here, so Administration, you’re going to have the Admin panel, and then down here we have this thing called partner tracking pixel. What the partner tracking pixel does … I’ll pull up what it looks like. If I click on this, it’s just going to give me the partner tracking pixel for my account, which looks like this. It looks like this guy right here is what you will find inside of there. Basically, it’s got your account subdomain at ontraport.com, and then it’s got this whole query string of gobbledygook back here. These are all different things that could be pushed into your Ontraport account.
The intention of this plugin is that you would put it on the confirmation or Thank You page of a shopping cart and then you would link all these fields, like email, you would link the email field in your shopping cart so it would say “email equals email field” in your shopping cart. Then the Thank You page, the shopping cart you’re using would dynamically fill in these blanks for you, and it puts it all together in this image, which is really nothing more than we’re trying to call up this URL. It’s a tracking pixel, just like your Facebook pixel might work, but we’re trying to call up this URL.
When we call this URL, Ontraport knows it’s your account at Ontraport, and then we have this whole string of info here that Ontraport is grabbing and saying, “Okay, the order ID equals this, the email equals that, and we’re going to push all this into that account.” It would come in like a purchase inside your account minus all the credit card details and that. It doesn’t have the transaction info, but it will have the purchase info inside your account so you can have a record of who purchased what. Then you can run rules off of, “Hey, they just purchased this.”
The Principle Behind the Ontraport WooCommerce Plugin
If I break down this WooCommerce plugin, it’s working off this principle. It’s using this partner tracking pixel that Ontraport has built in and it’s just linking that partner tracking pixel to WooCommerce. Here’s what it looks like. If I dug into my Thank You page on a WooCommerce site, here’s what the plugin would look like. Again, it would be your account. When you set up that plugin, you put in your subdomain. It’s just going to put it right there. Then it’s going to match all these fields to the WooCommerce fields and create this pixel that’s going to fire on that Thank You page.
Problem number one I see is people get rid of the Thank You page. They say, “I’m going to redirect them somewhere else,” and then suddenly their plugin stops working. That’s because the plugin only works if the Thank You page fires and this pixel is generated. Somehow you have to get this pixel to generate, and that’s what the WooCommerce plugin, Woo to Ontraport plugin is doing, is it’s got the script, it’s got the code. Here’s the code right here. It’s got all this code that it’s putting on that page to generate this pixel. Right here’s all the stuff that generates the pixel. It’s just living on that Thank You page. When you get rid of the Thank You page, you’ve gotten rid of the plugin. That’s problem number one I see.
Then number two is, what is it matching to what? Here it all is. These are all the different fields inside of Woo that it is matching to your Ontraport fields. I broke it down right here to make it a little simpler to read. Let’s blow this up. Per order, so for every order that goes through in your shopping cart, these fields are generated. It’s going to use the order ID in Ontraport is equal to the order number in Woo. The email in Ontraport is equal to the billing email in Woo. First name is equal to billing first name. Last name billing last name. Address. Billing. Woops, got the wrong character there. Billing address one. Address two. Billing address two. So on, so forth.
Here’s two that are trick … These come up a lot. Shipping amount. It’s going to equate that to order shipping. Tax. It’s going to say tax equals the cart tax plus the shipping tax. It’s going to take those two fields and put them together, and that’s where it’s generating this tax amount from.
Per line item, so for every item they order in the shopping cart it’s going to generate these items. It does that by it’ll say, “Item ID one,” and then if I have a second item it’s going to make a whole other set of these that says, “Item ID two, item ID three,” et cetera. It’s got item ID which is item skew. This is why you have to have the skew inside Woo equal to your product ID inside of Ontraport, because it’s going to push this in and say, “We just bought item skew whatever, and here that equals to item ID whatever inside of Ontraport.”
The external ID, it’s matching that to the item name. Then here’s the other interesting one, item price. Where does it get the price? It grabs that from item line subtotal, which is not what a lot of people expect, because they have a sale, they have a coupon code, and it’s not bringing in the correct price. That’s because it’s grabbing this item line subtotal price. Not 100% sure on the sale. I know coupon codes because they’re added at the cart level, are not grabbed per item. I think sale price is, but the coupon code definitely not. If somebody buys with the coupon, it’s still going to push in the full price right here because it’s grabbing the item line subtotal. Then item quantity is how many they bought. That’s pretty self explanatory.
There it is. That’s how this whole plugin works. It’s pretty slick. It’s a nice little plugin. Pretty reliable as long as you keep that page, that Thank You page alive, you don’t change the Thank You page, and as long as you understand what fields are matching to what it’s going to make sense to you. That is all I have for today.
