An overview of Site Tracking

Site Tracking is a powerful feature that connects your marketing and sales processes to your website activity. It allows ActiveCampaign to “see” and then “react” in real-time as contacts visit your site and view specific categories and pages. 

How is Site Tracking different than your analytics solution?

Analytics solutions, such as Google Analytics, give you statistics about your website activity. It is aggregated data that is meant to identify trends and issues with your website. 

Site Tracking, on the other hand, gives you insight into what individual contacts are doing on your site. Beyond that, and most importantly, it allows you to automatically create personalized experiences for each of your contacts as they interact with your website.

Using Site Tracking to improve your business processes

Site Tracking allows you to create marketing and sales processes that leverage behavioral targeting, triggered messages, and granular segmentation, all of which have proven to improve the contact experience and increase conversions.

• Trigger a message with a coupon code to send 30 minutes after a contact views a product page of your site but didn't make a purchase
• Apply a tag to indicate a contact's interest and begin a targeted follow-up sequence after two or more visits to a specific product category
• Fork an automation so you treat a contact differently if they've already viewed a certain page of your site
• Trigger automations when a contact views a page on your site
• Automatically move contacts to another stage of your sales pipeline when they view 3 or more important pages of your website (such as your pricing, product, and demo pages)
• Increase or decrease a contact or lead score on the basis of visits and views of specific pages.
• Personalize the content of your campaigns based on what categories of your site a contact has repeatedly viewed with using Conditional Content

By combining Site Tracking data with other behavioral data (such as email campaign opens, link clicks, and form submits), you can identify what information and products are most important and interesting to each contact so you can target your cross-channel messages with content and offers you know appeal to them. This will increase the relevance of your messages beginning a positive feedback loop that ultimately leads to happier contacts and higher conversions.

How does Site Tracking work?

Site tracking shows you which pages on your website were visited by known contacts. 

To use this feature, you need to whitelist your URL on the Settings>Tracking page in your ActiveCampaign account. We then provide you with a small snippet of tracking code. You need to add this code to the footer of every page on your website that you wish to track visits to. This tracking code allows page view data to be sent to your ActiveCampagin account.

We use first-party cookies to track visits made to every page on your site that has ActiveCampaign site tracking code installed. A first-party cookie is a cookie that is created by the domain that the contact is visiting. 

When the contact visits your site, their web browser saves data files to their computer under the website's name. This provides transparency to your contacts about where these tracking cookies came from and where their information is being stored.

First-party cookies cannot be shared or transferred from website to website. This is to protect the security of your contacts. If you have multiple websites listed in your ActiveCampaign account that use site tracking, contacts will need to be identified for each site in order to track their page visits.

To associate page view data with a contact, that contact needs to be identified. This allows us to link page visits with their email address. Page visit data is then stored in your account. It is made available on the contact's profile record and in the floating segment builder.

How contacts are identified

There are three ways to identify contacts who visit your page.

1. When contacts click on a link in a campaign.

The page that the contact goes to when they click a link in your campaign must be whitelisted in your ActiveCampaign account and have site tracking code installed.

We add a parameter to each link in your email that directs contacts to a page on your site that has site tracking installed. This parameter appears as "vgo_ee=<garbled_text>" in the URL bar when a contact clicks that link in your email. 

The garbled text is the encrypted email address of the contact. This allows us to identify the contact who clicked your campaign link and visited your web page. This parameter disappears from the URL bar as soon as the page loads.

2. When they submit a form created in ActiveCampaign.

When a contact submits your ActiveCampaign form, they need to redirect to a page on your website that has site tracking code installed. The default "Thank you" page for ActiveCampaign forms will not generate a tracking cookie for your contacts.

Note that if the form has double opt-in enabled, page views will not be tracked for visitors until they complete the opt-in process.

We are not able to identify visitors who submit a third-party form. 

3. By dynamically inserting the email address of known visitors into the tracking code.

If you've already identified a contact by their email address, you can insert their email address into the site tracking javascript code. See the section titled "How to pass a contact's email address into javascript code" below for more information.

Only page view data collected after the identification of the contact will be shown on their contact profile page.

Learn about Site Tracking and the GDPR. 

How to pass a contact's email address into javascript code

If you've already identified a contact by their email address, you can insert their email address into the site tracking javascript code. For instance, if you have a membership site, you might be able to identify them after they log in.

To do this, you will need to add the following line to the tracking code:

vgo('setEmail', 'Email_Address_Goes_Here');

above this line:

vgo('process');

If this is too technical for you, note that you do not need to use this option—you can still identify contacts with form submits and link clicks. However, if you are technical enough, this is an additional option available to you.

Once the code is on your site, and you've whitelisted your domains, ActiveCampaign will begin collecting data and adding it to your contact records as contacts are identified.

How to set up Site Tracking

Site Tracking is quick and easy to set up. We recommend that everyone set up Site Tracking because it's a core feature that enables more powerful marketing and sales processes.

Learn how to set up site tracking with ActiveCampaign.