Many would say that live streaming is a new trend gaining popularity nowadays, and blah blah blah. It is not true, obviously. For many years, live streaming was popular in the gamer and geek communities that used it to play games and observe how others play, discuss gaming, comics, and movie news, share their thoughts and views with those “of the same breed.” But with live video comes a unique challenge: how do you do conversion tracking when your audience is scattered across platforms, devices, and moments?
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Things started to change around the mid-2010s, when influencers and marketers started paying attention to this underexplored area. With time, live streaming became a powerful marketing tool, and with such power comes conversion tracking.
How not to lose opportunities to optimize live streaming advertising campaigns? What are the ways to measure the ads’ effectiveness?
Finally, is it worth continuing cooperation with one streamer, or do you need to try with someone new? We will try to answer these and other popular questions about tracking conversions in live streaming here.
Main Challenges Of Live Streaming Conversion Tracking And How To Overcome Them
Let’s have a tiny quiz before we move to the actual topic and start discussing what live streaming conversion tracking is served with. Please, read these 3 questions carefully and select only one answer for each of them.
Unlike offline conversion tracking, live streaming may involve hundreds of thousands and sometimes even millions of viewers simultaneously. These viewers are mostly an interested audience, not just random passersby.
Thus, the answer to the last question is c. Considering such numbers, it may be extremely difficult to control the data flow coming from all those people, especially when it is often interrupted by ad blockers—the answers to questions 1 and 2 are b and c, respectively.
Considering everything said above, we can highlight several main issues that everyone who wants to track live streaming conversions may face.
1. Limited Data Control in Real-Time Streams
Unlike offline campaigns or traditional web analytics, live streams can involve tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers simultaneously. The data flows fast, often across platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, making it hard to track behavior accurately in real time.
Solution: Use platforms like OneStream Live’s Hosted Pages to stream content in environments you control, enabling better pixel placement and analytics integration.
2. Ad Blockers Disrupting Tracking Scripts
Many viewers use browser extensions to block ads, and these often block conversion pixels and tracking scripts, too. This causes a major blind spot in your data and may mislead your analytics.
Solution: Switch to server-side tracking, where data is collected on your server and sent securely to analytics tools. This bypasses ad blockers and ensures cleaner, more complete data.
3. Privacy Regulations Limit Third-Party Tracking
Private data cannot be used for conversion tracking – this is regulated by numerous privacy policies, for instance, GDPR and CCPA. Companies that get such data and then pass it to the analytical platforms risk facing legal problems.
For live streaming conversion tracking, it is one of the most significant problems, as the more people are involved in the process, the higher the risk of breaking privacy policies, even by accident.
As a marketer who cooperates with streamers, you want to know which channels your advertisement is more successful in and which ones are the first candidates to stop cooperating with. The issues listed above may prevent you from doing this.
Best Practices for Conversion Tracking in Live Streaming
After extensive research, we can give you some recommendations on how to minimize the effect of ad blockers and ensure that you always stay compliant with privacy policies when tracking conversions in live streaming. All in all, if there were no way to do so, the question of best practices would not have arisen at all, would it?
1. Use server-side tracking instead of the more common client-side model
Tracking conversions solely on the client’s side is not as reliable a method as it used to be anymore. When sent to the analytical platform directly from the browser, the data is often incomplete.
This directly influences the analytics. To avoid this, it is recommended to switch to the server-side model; in this case, all the tracked data is delivered to the server first, where it is reviewed, completed, and cleaned of private information (to comply with privacy policies) before being sent to the analytical platform.
Such an approach significantly improves the quality of analytical reports and provides a much more comprehensive picture of how different campaigns and commercials perform.
2. Rely on first-party data in your work
Information received from the customers themselves is more trustworthy and useful than the information you may get from third-party platforms and aggregators. Moreover, such data will definitely be compliant with privacy policies, so you protect yourself from this side.
Gather first-party data through forms, questionnaires, and votes included in the commercials that run during live streams. Luckily, modern technology allows for this.
Pro Tip: Using OneStream Live’s multistream scheduling and pre-recorded streaming, you can run personalized campaigns at scale while gathering clean, actionable insights.
3. Customize Event Tracking with Tags and Pixels
Use custom tags and pixels to track the events crucial for your business, focus on specific engagements (for instance, page views, sign-ups, etc.), and collect the data that aligns with your marketing objectives. Considering the number of people usually involved in conversion tracking during a live stream, this practice is not only the best, it is a must.
Tools like Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager (for both client-side and server-side implementations) can be configured to track these events. At the same time, platforms like Twitch, YouTube Live, and Facebook Live allow you to integrate with analytics tools to monitor live stream performance.
Try implementing these recommendations in practice, and we are sure that the results will impress you pretty soon, and your understanding of which live streams are better for your commercials than others will become much better.
Conclusion
If a live streamer has a million viewers, it’s tempting to invest heavily in ads on their channel — but volume doesn’t equal performance. Track, test, and optimize before committing your ad budget.
To get there, implement server-side tracking, prioritize first-party data, and use custom analytics setups to capture the metrics that matter. Better tracking leads to smarter campaigns — and smarter campaigns lead to higher ROI.
Want to build streaming campaigns that convert — and track them effectively? Start streaming with OneStream Live and unlock advanced tools for analytics, multistreaming, and custom branding.
OneStream Live is a cloud-based live streaming solution to create, schedule, and multistream professional-looking live streams across 45+ social media platforms and the web simultaneously. For content-related queries and feedback, write to us at [email protected]. You’re also welcome to Write for Us!
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