I am assuming that event tracking will work such that if someone who has subscribed to one of my AC lists via an AC form, and then returns to my website - that their activity on my website will be identified and indicated on their Contact profile page in my AC account. Isn’t that the point?
So I followed the steps and activated it on AC and my site but in my testing this is not working as such.
The information on this page leaves me just as confused as I was when I started reading it. It says in the opening paragraph,
You can selectively include an email address as part of the javascript (on form completion pages, shopping carts, when users are logged in, etc…) and we will relate all of their past & future traffic on your site to that email address.
What does that mean? It sounds like I should put one contact’e email address in the code so the site can track the activity of that one contact. But obviously that is not right because then I would be only able to track the activity of one person.
I asked someone at AC via chat and they really had no idea how it worked.
Please - can someone help me understand this. thanks so much,
David
PS. I would like to add another related question to this. How does it track data? I am told by IP address but if a contact subscribed via their desktop computer and then later visits my website on their iPhone, then I do not think their iPhone and home computer would share the same IP address, would they? Or is done through cookies? And if so, then is there a time expiration?
You are correct that Site Tracking will track your contacts’ visits to web pages on your site.
Their activity will be listed on their contact page but, beyond that, these visits can be used to trigger automations and create segments. For instance, you could have an automation that sends an email when someone visits a certain page of your site or you could send a campaign to only contacts who have visited a certain product page.
All you need to do is insert the code into each page of your website and it will track contacts who have opted-in through a form on your site or clicked a link in your email campaign (either method will identify them). The “selectively include an email address…” guidance is in case you want to insert an email address using code. For instance, you might have a site that users log into. You could populate the email address field after they log in so that you can identify contacts that way. So, this is basically a third option for identifying contacts but it’s more complicated to configure and is probably too technical for most users to set up. You could hire a programmer to configure this though.
Let me know if this clears things up or if you still have other questions about this. I definitely hope you’ll start using Site Tracking… there is so much you can do with it. It’s one of our most powerful marketing automation features.
I did activate site tracking but it is not working for me. I signed up on my site using a different email address and have visited my site several times and those visits are not logging.
It could be because my internet provider does something unique which is that he switches which IP I am coming from in his attempt to keep a strong signal - so that is why I was wondering about more technically how it is implemented, if you or someone you know could explain that.
If you are using the AC forms then site tracking should work out of the box.
If not then site tracking won’t work until someone clicks through from one of your emails (otherwise AC doesn’t know who to associate the site tracking with). However you make a slight modification to the site tracking code in order to start tracking straight after optin from any form.
There are a number of ways you can do this but the easiest is to follow these 2 steps:
Pass their email to the “thank you” page in the URL. Most form providers will have an option to do this out of the box. The end result you want is a thank you page URL like this: yoursite.com/thankyoupage/?email=theiremail%40domain.com
Modify the AC site tracking code as per the below. This first gets the contacts email if it has been provided. Then there is a modification of the standard AC code which checks to see if there is an email and if so it uses that. If there is no email it keeps this blank. After that is the standard site tracking code (don’t forget to update this with YOUR account ID).
<script type="text/javascript"> function getUrlVar(key){ var result = new RegExp(key + "=([^&]*)", "i").exec(window.location.search); return result && decodeURIComponent(result[1]) || ""; } var email = getUrlVar('email'); var trackcmp_email = (typeof(email) != "undefined") ? email : ''; var trackcmp = document.createElement("script"); trackcmp.async = true; trackcmp.type = 'text/javascript'; trackcmp.src = '//trackcmp.net/visit?actid=YOURID&e='+encodeURIComponent(trackcmp_email)+'&r='+encodeURIComponent(document.referrer)+'&u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href); var trackcmp_s = document.getElementsByTagName("script"); if (trackcmp_s.length) { trackcmp_s[0].parentNode.appendChild(trackcmp); } else { var trackcmp_h = document.getElementsByTagName("head"); trackcmp_h.length && trackcmp_h[0].appendChild(trackcmp); } </script>
As I said there are a number of ways you can achieve a similar result.
In my case I actually save the contacts email to a local cookie. I can then use this for both site tracking and event tracking.
The event tracking is really handy to track whatever events you may be interested in such as:
clicking on a certain link (or links)
mouse hovering over, well pretty much anything
focussing on form fields (i.e. an event of started form submission)
with a bit more effort percentage of videos watched
I looked into your question with multiple IP addresses and that shouldn’t be the issue. I’d like to set you up with a member of our support team who will be able to help your go through a checklist to troubleshoot what’s keeping your site tracking from populating.
To my knowledge the site tracking works on a cookie basis, not IP. So if you you’re visiting from your home computer even using another email address it will only update your existing contact with that new email, it won’t create a new one. Your best bet is to clear your cookies and try from another browser or computer fresh, with another email address.
Isn’t the IP address irrelevant since site tracking is cookie based? As per one of the OP’s questions… there really is no way to account for someone using their desktop and then their phone because one may be cookied and the other not. The only way would be is if they opened a link on their phone from an email or submitted another optin form that sent their email along, correct?
If someone uses the same email on different devices (the cookie would be different) does it still then aggregate their site activity into their single contact? It wouldn’t for example have two contacts for the same email correct?
Would be great to know for sure exactly how it works, from someone at AC. There must be someone who knows for sure who can weigh in on where it IP or cookies and either way, how it works with people who may be going to the site from different devices, different browsers, etc.
we have the example @robertg explained. Most of our leads come from forms and email links they Open / submit on phone browsers. But at the moment of the purchase the prospect must be on their computer, using a Photobook Software Designer (we sell Photobooks and the customers must use the software, they download on their computers from our website, to design the photobooks).
Our challegne it’s identify and track the customer trogouth both platforms.
Any advise or suggestion to do this?
Thanks!
If you’re trying to identify and track the customers journey through both platforms it gets tricky. You may need something like Conversion Fly, Clickmeter or Wicket Reports which uses both cookies and custom UTM links that track every journey the make and not just first or last touch attribution. It gets difficult to figure out what email lead to a sale or if it was the ad that did it but 3 days later from the email etc. You can make a lot of assumptions without seeing what was really the defining factor in someone’s reason to buy. Hope that helps!
Hi!
Site tracking works based on cookies set on the visitor navigation session. It’s possible to track a contact journey with attribution, that will record every touchpoint of a contact (using UTMs) until they reach a conversion. How does ActiveCampaign Attribution work?