Redirecting users back to webflow site for tracking

Greetings! The site I am currently building has links to several external sites that are not linked to the site, it’s a youth soccer club and members are required to go to these sites for different things such as purchasing uniforms and registering for different leagues the club participates in.

My client is setting up Google Ads and wants to track every action users complete on these external sites such as how much they spent on the external uniforms site, and to do I am told that there would need to be a redirect from the external site to a specific thank you page on the site I’m building after the purchase is completed to track these actions.

Has anyone done something like this, is it even possible? I appreciate any advice, thank you.

Read only link:
https://preview.webflow.com/preview/nvufc?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=nvufc&preview=1e4880cc6345347b117ba4c7a3db81b9&workflow=preview

I don’t believe there is unless you manage the external sites as well.

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That’s not how the web works. If you could attach public tracking scripts to other people sites, imagine the mayhem. The internet would be useless and insecure, bogged down by data leeches.

However, SOME providers for things like online stores and online bookings offer the ability for you to have your own “store” account, and to configure it with an Analytics or GTM ID. Then you can get that data in your own account.

If you’re dealing with an existing store, with existing products, that’s highly unlikely.

It’s also unlikely that you’ll be able to get them to redirect after purchase to your own site, with a package of information about the purchase ( i.e. querystring params, an order ID you can access via API, or a FORM POST body ) But, this is possible with some shopping cart systems, so you could dig and see if you can find a way. If you’re a big enough client for them, you never know…

However if you could get them to redirect with that data-package, then yes, you can build a page on your webflow site which tracks and captures that data as conversions. The best approach would probably be to have some kind of hidden /thank-you page, that has some google tag manager scripting to dissect the URL / data on requests. You’d probably want one for each external site, so you can configure them independently, and have a different message on each of them.

If you do this, be prepared to write script, and to get pretty gnarly with GTM. There are other solutions worth examining too like Conversion Ruler.

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Thank you for the info Michael! I was pretty sure “just set up a redirect to a thank you page” was not going to be so simple and it’s good to have an explanation why.