How Can I Track Conversions Occurring on Third-Party Websites?

Nelio A/B Testing can only track visitor interactions that happen on your WordPress website.

Once a visitor leaves your site, the plugin no longer has access to what happens on the external platform, so it can’t directly detect whether the visitor completed a purchase, booking, or other action.

Fortunately, there are two common ways to measure these conversions.

1. Track the Outbound Click

The simplest approach is to track the click that sends visitors to the external website.

Create a Click External Link conversion action that monitors the link pointing to the third-party service.

This lets you measure how many visitors attempted to complete the action, for example:

• clicking Buy Now;
• clicking Book an Appointment;
• clicking Start Checkout; or
• clicking an affiliate link.

Although this doesn’t confirm that the visitor completed the process, it accurately measures how many visitors left your website to do so.

This approach is ideal when:

• you don’t control the external website;
• you’re using affiliate links; or
• the booking or checkout process happens entirely on another platform.

2. Redirect Visitors Back to Your Website (Recommended)

If you control the external platform—or it allows you to configure a Return URL or Success URL—you can redirect visitors back to your WordPress site after the conversion.

For example:

1. A visitor clicks Buy Now on your website.
2. They complete the purchase on an external checkout.
3. The external platform redirects them to a dedicated Thank You page on your WordPress site.
4. Nelio A/B Testing records a Page View conversion when that page is loaded.

This is the most reliable way to measure off-site conversions because it confirms that the visitor completed the process before returning to your website.

Redirecting to Your Website

Many external services let you configure a Return URL or Success URL without writing any code.

If not, and you control the external page, you can redirect visitors manually:

<script>
	window.location = 'https://your-site.com/thank-you/';
</script>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Best Practices

When tracking conversions through a Thank You page:

• use a page that’s dedicated to successful conversions;
• don’t include the page in your site’s navigation; and
• avoid linking to it from other pages.

This helps ensure that visits to the page represent genuine conversions.

Summary

Nelio A/B Testing cannot track activity that happens outside WordPress—but you still have two practical options:

✔ Track the outbound click, Simple to set up, useful when you can’t modify the external site.

✔ Redirect back to a Thank You page inside WordPress, Best option when you can configure the external platform.

Both approaches let you measure the performance of your variants even when the final conversion happens off-site.