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Depict tracking uses three id vocabularies. They look similar but are not interchangeable, and sending the wrong kind does not produce an error — the event is accepted and then silently fails to match anything, which quietly degrades your metrics. This page is the reference for which id each event needs.

Why the difference matters

  • Result ids are unique per API response, not per product — they tie a click to the exact search, listing or recommendation that produced it. That link is what powers surface-level performance metrics and lets ranking learn from real behaviour.
  • Product ids join PDP views and add-to-carts to your catalog. If the id you send doesn’t match the displays’ product_id, those events can’t be connected to products.
  • Transaction product ids join purchase line items to your catalog through a mapping that is refreshed on every catalog ingestion. A line item whose item_id doesn’t match drops out of per-product revenue, best-seller and funnel metrics — while still counting toward raw totals, which makes the gap easy to miss.
The most common integration mistake is sending the displays’ product_id as a purchase item_id (or vice versa). They are different vocabularies — purchases match on your SKUs, not on product_id — unless your catalog happens to use the same value for both.

How to verify

The “Tracking status” tab on app.depict.ai shows your incoming events live. The table at the bottom lists examples of valid product ids from your ingested catalog — compare them against what your events are sending. After your first test purchases, confirm they map to catalog products rather than only appearing in raw event counts.