I have 3 emails drip fed over 3 days all going through to the same piece of content in AC. When they click through from an email, AC applies an engaged tag, which then ‘unlocks’ the rest of the automation. If they don’t click one of the first 3 emails, I remove them from the campaign.
Is there a way for that same AC tag to be applied if they click through from an FB ad instead of from an AC email? This would be a retargeting ad, so their email would already be in the AC system.
Should be no problem, so long as your ads are following best practices, and you have Site Tracking turned on.
Setup an automation with a Site Visit Trigger, and check for the appropriate UTM parameters from the ad. For example when visited contains utm_content=unlock-ad will match
example.com/landing-page/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=unlock-key&utm_content=unlock-ad&utm_term=my-ad-variant
Then just choose “add a tag” as the action for the automation. This will add the tag whenever they click on the link in the ad.
Make sure that you use OR statements, or you keep the utm_params in the same order for each ad, otherwise it could miss some users.
Great, sounds easy enough! How does AC know who is clicking the ad? Would be interesting to know how it knows which contact to apply the tag to.
Thanks for your help!
So long as they are previously identified, the Site Tracking script uses cookies to append the tag to one of your contacts.
The system continues to track behavioral data like site visits even before the contact has been identified using the cookie. For example, if the contact hasn’t been identified yet, and they click on the ad, and then are later identified, then it applies that anonymous history to the contact retroactively.
(although in this case, that event probably won’t trigger the automation, since that happened in the past)
Wow…I find myself loving Active Campaign more every day 
Thanks again for your help!
Tom
Glad to hear it Tom! We’re loving the great questions and use cases you keep presenting!