Summary: This page goes through the steps of how to effectively measure traffic and conversions from paid advertising campaigns to your pages on Envato marketplaces. This article will explain what the tracking parameters are, show you how to set up your URLs, how to configure your Google Analytics and how to interpret the results so you can start tracking your conversion.
Note: Google Analytics is available to Exclusive Authors and Authors who have reached the Elite level.
- Introduction to Google Analytics on Envato
- Getting started
- Linking your Google Analytics ‘Tracking ID’ to Envato Market
- Custom Parameters for your item URLs
- Setting up your URLs
- So where does the data go?
- How to set up and track these parameters in your Google Analytics
- Tracking conversion and Ecommerce performance
- Excluding PayPal from your conversion results
- Google Analytics FAQs
Introduction to Google Analytics on Envato
Paid advertising campaigns are a proven method to drive traffic and sales on your Envato Market items. We want our authors to be able to track the performance of paid advertising campaigns converting to sales on Envato marketplaces, through Google Analytics.
In order for this to be a reality, we have made some improvements to the ways in which you can track traffic that you send to checkouts through sources such as landing pages and ads. We have added custom parameters that allow you to track the source of traffic and identify unique campaigns you are running.
Getting started
Already got Google Analytics setup and with a ‘Property’ and ‘Tracking ID that you’ve linked to your Envato Market account? Great—you can skip ahead to the next step.
If you’re new to Google Analytics, first you need to establish your account and create a new ‘Property’. Follow the steps outlined in the following tutorial and once you have a ‘Tracking ID’, come back here and we will show you how to link it to your Envato Market account.
Linking your Google Analytics ‘Tracking ID’ to Envato Market
Step 1:
To link your Google Analytics Tracking ID to Envato Market, first head to the ‘settings’ page on any Envato Market site (e.g. ThemeForest).
See FAQs if you are using multiple Envato author accounts.
Step 2:
Select ‘Google Analytics’ from the Author Tools menu on the left hand side.
Step 3:
Add your Google Analytics ‘Tracking Code’ and press ‘Save’. Now that you’ve got your account linked, we can send data to your Google Analytics account. Next, you can start adding custom parameters to the URLs you wish to track.
Custom Parameters for your item URLs
We have set up new parameters that will go at the end of your item URLs when sending traffic to your item page, or more importantly, directly to the item checkout page. These parameters will allow you to track the performance of traffic coming from paid campaigns and landing pages, within Google Analytics.
This section will give you a brief overview of the new parameters and what they do. The following section ‘Setting Up Your URL’ will breakdown how our item page URLs are structured, and how you can customise your links to include the parameters.
The custom parameters are as follows:
- Author ID: This is your unique username, and will be represented in a URL as &aid=
- Example if your username was ‘username123’: &aid=username123
- Traffic Source: This is what you use to track where your traffic is coming from, and will be represented in a URL as &aso=
- Example if you were sending from a Google Ad: &aso=googleads
- Campaign: This parameter is used to track the specific campaign(s) you’re running and will be represented in a URL as &aca=
- Example if you were running a Cyber Monday campaign: &aca=cybermonday
If you were to put all of those parameters together with an item URL that links to the checkout page, would look like this:
To show you how we’ve put that link together, the next section will take you through a step-by-step guide.
Setting up your URLs
- To make sure that you’re sending and receiving the correct traffic and insights, it is important to understand how to structure your URL with the custom parameters. This section will also breakdown how URL’s are used on Envato Market and how to customize them for your items.
It is important to know where to find your unique Item ID. This will ensure you’re sending traffic to the right place. The following graphic shows you how to identify your Item ID.
- Once you have an Item ID, you can use it to create a URL that sends traffic to your item checkout page. The following graphic shows a URL that will take a customer to the checkout using the Item ID.
You’ve now got the first half of your URL, which will send customers to your item checkout page.
We will now look at how to add the new custom parameters and create the second half of your URL. 
a) First add your unique username by using the Author ID parameter &aid= in this example we will use ‘username123’ as our username.
b) Next add the source of traffic using the Traffic Source parameter &aso= in this example we will use ‘googleads’ as our source.
c) Finally we will determine which of your campaigns this link is for by adding the Campaign parameter &aca=. In this example we will use ‘cybermonday’.
Now you have a link that will send traffic to your items checkout page while also capturing the data to send to your Google Analytics. In the next section we will show you how to configure your Google Analytics so you can start tracking and comparing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Copy the link and add in your parameters
https://themeforest/checkout/from_item/[item_id]?license=regular&aid=&aso=&aca=
Important Notes:
- When following these examples, make sure you choose the correct marketplace for your item (e.g. ThemeForest, CodeCanyon etc.).
- We only accept standard alpha numeric terms (e.g. 123456, abcdefg), dashes (“-”) and underscores (“_”)..
- You will also need to send all 3 parameters at once. If any of these components are missing, the data won’t be captured or sent to Envato servers reliably.
So where does the data go?
We will track these parameters through the checkout process on Envato Market and send the conversion statistics directly to your Google Analytics. These sales statistics will be sent to you broken down by the custom parameters you have provided to us.
If you have Google Analytics set up correctly, you should already be receiving:
- Item pageviews
- Portfolio pageviews
- Transactions (for single purchases).
You will now get the checkout page views with the additional details from your parameters. With this new data, you will now see transactions broken down by the new information you have provided to us (Traffic Source and Campaign).
How to set up and track these parameters in your Google Analytics
The best way for you to track and analyse the data from the custom parameters is by using Google Analytics segments. Segments let you isolate the custom parameters (among other things) so you can contrast and compare the effectiveness of various campaigns and traffic sources.
Each time you wish to run and track a new campaign or traffic source, you can set up a new segment within Google Analytics.
We will show you a step-by-step guide on how to create a segment with the custom parameters.
Step 1
Open Google Analytics and from the side menu navigate to the Overview section within Audience.
Step 2
Click on ‘+ NEW SEGMENT’
Each time you wish to create a new segment to analyse and track, you will start here.
Step 3
Under ‘Advanced’, click on ‘Conditions’.
This will bring up an area for you to start putting in your custom parameters as a condition.
Step 4
Name your segment. What you call it is up to you and can be used to specify what you're tracking. For example, you might have something like ‘Cyber Monday 2021 - Landing Page’.
Step 5
Leave the filter set to ‘Sessions’ and ‘Include’. Click on the left hand box as indicated by the red arrow and a drop down menu will appear.
Step 6
Search for and select ‘Landing Page’
Step 7
Select ‘matches regex’ from the next drop down box. We will be entering in the custom parameters ‘regular expressions’.
As such you will need to add “.*” at the beginning and end of your parameters.
Example:
.*aid=username123.*
.*aso=googleads.*
.*aca=cybermonday.*
Step 8
Enter in your Author ID parameter.
Remember, this is your unique username and will look like this: .*aid=username.*
Make sure the filter is set to ‘Landing Pages’ and ‘matches regex’.
Click ‘+Add Filter’ to add the next parameter
Step 9
Enter in your Traffic Source parameter.
Remember, this is your unique username and will look like this: .*aso=googleads.*
Make sure the filter is set to ‘Landing Pages’ and ‘matches regex’.
Click ‘+Add Filter’ to add the next parameter
Step 10
Finally, enter your Campaign parameter.
Remember, this is your unique username and will look like this: .*aca=cybermonday.*
Again, make sure the filter is set to ‘Landing Pages’ and ‘matches regex’.
Now you have all of your custom parameters in place. You can save your segment and start tracking the data.
Step 11
Save your segment and make sure you’ve remembered to name it.
Example: ‘Cyber Monday 2021 - Landing Page’
Congrats! You now have a segment with your custom parameters.
Step 12
Now you can see the traffic isolated to the custom parameters that you have filtered via your segment.
To compare this data to all traffic (or another segment) just click the ‘+ Add Segment’ button.
Step 13
Select ‘All Users’ followed by clicking ‘Apply’ to compare your custom segment with all of your traffic.
Now you can see the traffic from the custom parameters represented by the blue line and the traffic from all users represented by the orange line in the image below:
If you are running multiple campaigns and wish to add another segment to compare:
- First make sure you’ve got new custom parameters for the URL (&aso=, &aca=)
- Next follow Steps 2-12 and create your new segment and begin tracking.
Tracking conversion and Ecommerce performance
Now that you know how to set up and track your custom parameters through the use of segments, you can start tracking the performance of your campaigns all the way through to a sale. The Ecommerce section of Google Analytics allows you to visualize your transactions.
You can view the segments that were created in steps 2 to 12 with your custom parameters and view the transactions. This will give you an understanding as to which campaigns offer the best return on investment and which campaigns may need to be tweaked.
These instructions will show you how to view the transactions and conversion of your campaigns.
Step 14
Using the navigation menu, go to ‘Conversions’ followed by ‘Ecommerce’ and ‘Overview’.
Step 15
Select ‘+ Add Segment’
Step 16
Now you can select the segment(s) for your custom parameters that were created in Steps 2-12, or alternatively add new segments following the same steps.
Choose the segments (in this example we’re adding a custom segment and selecting ‘All Users’ to the custom parameters with all traffic) and click ‘Apply’.
Step 17
You can now see the transactions for that particular segment!
Note: All the data shown this step belongs to the public Google Merchandise store's Google Analytics account and are for illustrative purposes.
Step 18
You can drill down your different items by selecting the ‘Product Performance’ option. This will allow you to see how various items perform with different campaigns by comparing the segments you have created.
Note: All the data shown this step belongs to the public Google Merchandise store's Google Analytics account and are for illustrative purposes.
To ensure that your conversion data is accurate, we recommend excluding PayPal traffic from Google Analytics. The next section will show you how to exclude PayPal from your results.
Excluding PayPal from your conversion results
Excluding PayPal from your Google Analytics results is important. Many of Envato's customers checkout using PayPal and if it is not excluded from your results, ‘paypal.com’ will be captured as a source of conversion traffic.
Step 1
Navigate to the ‘Admin’ button on the side menu of any of the Google Analytics pages.
Step 2
In the middle menu column, select ‘Tracking Info’
Step 3
From the ‘Tracking Info’ drop down, select ‘Referral Exclusion List’.
Step 4
Now you just need to press ‘+ ADD REFERRAL EXCLUSION’ which will open a dialogue box.
Step 5
Add in ‘paypal.com’ and press ‘Create’.
Step 6
Great work, you’ve now excluded PayPal data from interfering with your analytics tracking.
Google Analytics FAQs
I've got multiple Envato author accounts, how should I track my traffic across these?
I’ve got multiple Envato author accounts, how should I track my traffic across these?
I use Impact Radius to generate links, how do I take advantage of these changes?
My total sales numbers from Envato Market do not match Google Analytics revenue figures exactly, why?
What do I do if I want to send traffic directly to my item page and not the checkout page?
What do I do if I want to send traffic to an item with an Extended License?