Webhooks with http status code returned

  • 3 September 2010
  • 10 replies
  • 14 views

It would be really really really really awesome if the unbounce webhook method for submitting forms would be able to apply simple logic to a response from the POST url based on the HTTP status code.

For instance. A code of 200 would indicate that everything is OK whereas a code of 5xx would indicate that something has gone wrong.

This would allow us to feed back to the user submitting the form that the submission (in our case, new account creation) was successful.

It would then be great if this successful result could be counted in unbounce as a conversion.


10 replies

Hey Derek! That’s a pretty cool idea, and would solve the issue of folks who want to use an Unbounce page to test account signup pages.

The challenge from an engineering perspective is that webhooks are typically processed asynchronously. This makes them more robust in that they can be retried on failure, and additionally, if the target system is responding slowly, it doesn’t bring down *our* site.

The downside is that there’s no direct and easy way to feed the results back to the person submitting the form.

So, a couple options here:

  • offer a “synchronous webhook” option for folks wanting to do this
  • offer an indirect and clever feedback mechanism where Javascript code on your Unbounce page would poll for a response

Once we start returning results from the webhook, there’s not much reason to limit it to just the status code. We could return the response body as well, which means you could potentially include custom error messages and the like.

Hmmm…

Carl,

Thanks for your response.

I was wondering if you at all planned to implement something like this in the near future?

As you can imagine tracking our signups is of extreme importance to us and without a way to register a “conversion” using webhooks or a signup form in an iframe, unbounce falls short.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like your service. Everything else is just the way we need it! However without conversion tracking, it’s almost useless!

Another solution to the problem would be for unbounce to expose a small API which contained a simple call to register a conversion. It could work like this:

* Visitor lands on landing page and is given a unique id for the first visit.
* Visitor leaves without signing up
* Visitor comes back 4 days later via a different source. Their cookie is updated to contain the new visit.
* Each time the visitor lands on the page our iframe or a custom form is loaded and the unique ID of the visitor is passed to the iframe via the src url or is made a hidden field in the form.
* The user signs up. The unique ID is passed to the server and then the server uses the unique ID to register a conversion with your API.

It’s a rough outline but it’s basically the way we’re tracking signups when our signup form is embedded on other 3rd party sites. It works very well and we have a complete history of all the visits and referral sources of that visitor before they actually committed to signing up.

Anyhoo, any indication of a timeframe around providing more ways to register a conversion would be much appreciated.

Hi Derek! Apologies for missing your reply on this, it was in my inbox, so not sure how I missed it.

We are currently working on adding external tracking for Unbounce. If I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, I think you could simply embed your signup form in an iframe, and then have your success page include the tracking bug to register the conversion. Your embedded form would be responsible for delivering your tracking cookie to accomplish the visit history recording you’re describing.

We’ll have this a *lot* sooner than the webhook stuff I was describing above…

Thanks for your response Carl.

Any chance we could get an ETA?

Cheers

We’re working hard on it! Should be out later this month…

Thanks Carl. Appreciate your response. Looking forward to it!

Hey Derek, one quick question. Do you have your Unbounce landing pages and your signup form hosted on the same domain? (i.e. signup form on www.yoursite.com and Unbounce pages on something like ads.yoursite.com or promo.yoursite.com)?

Hi Carl, speaking on behalf of Derek, Yes we will be running our landing pages and signup form on the same domain.

Hi guys,

Was just wondering where you’re at with this? We really need a way to track conversions using an api call or something similar.

Thanks

Derek

Hi Kain! We do have external tracking now:

http://support.unbounce.com/entries/3…

Apologies for not updating this thread, I thought we had managed to find all the relevant places (we also included it in a recent newsletter, not that we expect *everyone* to read *every* newsletter), so sorry for missing this one. We really need to add new feature announcements in our app as well.

Anyway, let us know if this does/doesn’t work for you!

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