Hi,
I have been exploring Active Campaign for my company, and I have a question about event tracking.
When I changed a contact’s email address, it’s associated events in history disappeared. I was wondering if there is a way to transfer the event history to this new email address?
It’s a valid use case that a user on my site can change his/her email addresse, and the accumulated events can be lost, due to this change.
In addition, can I associate event tracking to a custom property rather than email, defined inside the visit property, like visit[userid]? I can also create a custom property in contacts, named as userid, so that the event and contact can be linked together.
Great to hear that you’re exploring our platform! What aspects are you enjoying? Unsure about?
This is a very valid use-case, I agree with you wholeheartedly there. However, both our Site Tracking & Event Tracking are tied strictly to a contact record, thus an email address, and currently there is no way to transfer a contact record’s data/history.
The associated events haven’t technically disappeared, they’re still in your account, but since you’ve changed the contact record (replaced the email address) they’re no longer linked.
My recommendation, so that this data is still available to you, is to have two contact records for that contact (and mark the old one as outdated with a tag).
I am still new to ActiveCampaign, so I was wondering if you could explain your recommendation further? Specifically, I want to know if it works in the following scenario, which is crucial to us.
an email template is created, containing the Purchase Event data as a personalized field in the content. e.g. Hi %FULLNAME%, you purchased a %EVENT:PurchaseEvent%, and there is a promotion now.
an campaign is created, sending the email to customerA’s latest email address (customerANew@example.com)
As you explained, by default, the %EVENT:PurchaseEvent% will not be correctly replaced by “chocolate bar”, because the event is linked to the original contact email address. You mentioned I can create two contact records for a contact, and mark a previous one as obsolete. In doing so the event data is still available. would you explain this approach in the above scenario?
In case anyone else runs across this old questions here is and updated answer.
I asked support this question:
Are there any current issues with changing a contacts email address? Will it still have all the contacts events and and activities connected to it?
And here is their answer:
“No, certainly feel free to do so. All the previous data will still be on its profile.”
I have also personal tested changing a contact email address and all of their associated event history was still there. So this is an old issue that doesn’t effect the current software.