You can’t scale things that you can’t track. And until now, it’s been almost impossible to track purchases, opt-ins, bookings, and other crucial conversions from organic social media.

Ellipsend not only makes this finally possible, but also makes it easy to track results from your DMs and organic social content, even from individual posts or stories. So you can scale what works and no longer need to wonder if your reach is translating to revenue.

Important note: In order to make the most of this guide, you should already understand how Ellipsend Campaigns work, as well as what Activities, Pipelines, and Pipeline Stages are. If not, be sure to check out this guide on Ellipsend Campaigns.

Activities are exactly what they sound like: the different Activities that leads perform throughout an Ellipsend Campaign. You can even add Custom Fields to Activities, which allow you to track very specific data for your team to access in the Inbox and Reports (for example, Cash Collected or Expected Revenue).

Activities power Ellipsend’s unique ability to track revenue and conversions back to each post or story on social media, allowing you to build a content strategy around tangible results rather than just likes and views. More on Activities in our Reports guide (Coming Soon!).

In this guide, you’ll learn how Activities and their custom field data can be added to contacts manually by your team in the Inbox, or automatically through our integrations with platforms like Zapier and GoHighLevel.

Important note: Activities are always attached to pipeline stages, so that as leads perform Activities during a Campaign, they're pushed through the different stages of a Campaign's Pipeline.

Upon signing up with Ellipsend, you should already have some preset Activities available on your account: Follow-Up, Purchased, and Abandoned. By now, you’ve probably even created other Activities specific to your business.

Many Activities can be tracked automatically using tools like Zapier or our integrations with platforms like GoHighLevel. Some Activities, however, are best tracked manually by your team in the Inbox.

For example:

It’s very easy to track Activities manually in the Inbox. As your team moves the Contact to a new Pipeline Stage in a Campaign, they’ll be prompted to fill out the custom fields on the Activity associated with that Stage. If there are multiple Activity options assigned to a Pipeline Stage, you can choose which Activity to add by selecting it from the dropdown.

Once they click Save, the Activity will save on the Contact and they will be moved to the Pipeline Stage.

Ellipsend is the first and only platform that can automatically track revenue and other conversions from each post or story on your organic social media.

In order to power this functionality, we’ve created the Ellipsend Tracking Token. It contains all of the information required for Ellipsend to automatically map any activities to the Post, Campaign, Contact, and Automation that it came from.

Simply put, the Ellipsend Tracking Token is a long string of text that is automatically added as a URL parameter to all links sent in Ellipsend. It’s very easy to set up the Ellipsend Tracking Token, under Settings>Integrations>API. You just need to choose which URL parameter that Ellipsend will add the Token to.

Make sure that you choose a URL parameter that is supported by your tech stack and isn’t already being used by your marketing team. In most cases, we recommend using “utm_term”.

Don’t worry, if you are using other URL parameters in your links, Ellipsend won’t change those. Whichever URL parameter you choose will be simply added to links sent in Ellipsend.

Important note: The Ellipsend Tracking Token will only be added to (therefore you can only track conversions from) links that are sent as buttons. If you send plaintext links via Automations or in the Inbox, the Ellipsend Tracking Token will not be added and conversions from these links won’t be tracked.

It’s simple and easy to track conversions from links sent via Automations. Here’s how:

Your team can also send links in the Inbox that contain the Ellipsend Tracking Token: Here’s how:

Here are a few examples of Single-Touch conversions that can be automatically tracked in Ellipsend through our integrations with platforms like Zapier and GoHighLevel:

To integrate with Zapier or GoHighLevel, you’ll need to use your API Token which can be found under Settings>Integrations>API.

To see a visual example of how a Single-Touch conversion can be automatically tracked via Zapier, check out the “Tracking "Single-Touch" Conversions Using Zapier” chapter in the video at the beginning of this guide.

Ellipsend has an app in Zapier’s marketplace which you can connect with using your Ellipsend API token. You can then create an action step in the Zap which adds the Activity to Contact, using the Ellipsend Tracking Token and dynamic data from the trigger record to complete the Activity fields.

For an in-depth tutorial on how to track Activities from conversions in Zapier, see this guide (Coming Soon!).

Ellipsend also has an app in GoHighLevel’s marketplace which you can connect with using your Ellipsend API token. To add the Ellipsend app to your GoHighLevel account, go to Settings>Integrations>GoHighLevel and add your Ellipsend API Token in the following steps.

You can then create an action step in your GoHighLevel Workflow Automations which adds the Activity to Contact, using the Ellipsend Tracking Token and dynamic data from the trigger record to complete the Activity fields.

For an in-depth tutorial on how to track Activities from conversions in GoHighLevel, see this guide (Coming Soon!).

While it’s fairly easy to set up manual and automated tracking systems to power your Ellipsend account, it’s important to understand the most common pitfalls so that you can avoid any issues with your reporting in Ellipsend.

The first mistake is forgetting to add a Contact to a Stage (and therefore to a Campaign) before sending a link that you want to track Activities from. This is because the Campaign ID is one of many data points that Ellipsend includes automatically in the Ellipsend Tracking Token.

For example, if you were to send a link in an Automation and then add the Contact to the Pipeline Stage, the Ellipsend Tracking Token would be added but it wouldn’t have a Campaign ID. See example of a broken setup below:

When that Contact converts and you try to send that Activity into Ellipsend via Zapier, you’d see the following error message in the API Logs:

To avoid this, make sure that the Contact is added to a Pipeline Stage as part of the Campaign before sending any links in the Inbox or via Automations. See example of a proper setup below:

The second mistake is one that should never happen, as you’ll be mapping Activities to Pipeline Stages in the Campaign Wizard. If you forget, this can be easily solved by going to Settings>Campaigns>Pipelines.

Click Edit on the Pipeline Stage where you’d like to attach the Activity, select it from the Activity Groups, and click Save.

Just like that, when the Activity comes in, it’ll now be moved automatically to the proper Pipeline Stage in the Campaign.

Links must be sent as “button links” in order to be trackable. This is because Ellipsend automatically adds the Tracking Token to links before wrapping them in a nice, user-friendly button and delivering to your Contacts.

Another reason why you should never send naked links is to avoid risking your account. While social platforms haven’t outright stated that sending naked links can lead to account suspension, their automated security algorithms prefer links sent as buttons so as to avoid being confused as spam.

As great as it is that Ellipsend finally makes it possible to track direct conversions from links sent via DM, there are often multiple intermediary steps or conversions between the link being sent and a final conversion.

Here are a few examples of Multi-Touch conversions that can be automatically tracked in Ellipsend through our integrations with platforms like Zapier and GoHighLevel:

The primary difference between tracking Activities from Multi-Touch vs. Single-Touch conversions is that you’ll need to attach the Ellipsend Tracking Token to the contact somehow, typically when they first opt-in to that funnel/campaign.

For example, if a lead books a sales call via Calendly, you can add the Ellipsend Tracking Token to a Custom Field on the Opportunity (as it’s called in Close/GoHighLevel, “Deal” in HubSpot). In that same step, you can send the Activity into Ellipsend.

Then, whenever a Contact in your CRM does anything (for example, Opportunity moves to “Deal Won” Status), you can check if they have an Ellipsend Tracking Token attached and if so, send that Activity into Ellipsend.

Important note: Though not required, we recommend adding the Token to the Opportunity/Deal rather than to the Contact itself, as this allows the Contact to be in multiple Ellipsend Campaigns at the same time without you worrying if the Token from Campaign A will overwrite Campaign B.