One method of keeping track of your contact's interests is to apply a tag when they repeatedly view a page or section of your site. You can use this interest tag to personalize your email content (using Conditional Content) or you could begin a targeted follow-up sequence when the tag is applied. You can also use these tags to get a sense of what your contacts are interested in as a whole. For instance, you might see that more and more contacts are looking for a particular feature, so you know to update your sales copy to place more emphasis on that feature.
Make sure that you have Site Tracking set up.
1. Click “Automations” in the left menu to navigate to the Automations Overview.
2. Click "Create an automation.”
3. Click “Start from Scratch” then click “Continue.”
4. Click “Web page is visited” to have the automation run when a page of your website is viewed by a contact.
5. Click "Continue."
6. Now you'll need to decide what you are measuring their interest in because that determines how you configure the triggering conditions. Here's an example:
Let's say you have an ecommerce store that sells electronics. You want to tag your contacts by which category of products they are interested in. You sell: televisions, blu ray players, surround sound speakers, computers, and smartphones.
You would create an automation for each category of products. Each automation would check for repeat views of the web pages in that category of products and then apply a tag if they've viewed two or more pages in that category. For the rest of this article, I'll configure an automation that looks for repeat views of the “televisions” category of products. To set up a complete interest tagging system, I'd create four more automations so that I have one applying interest tags for each category of products.
For my example, I would input the URL of the televisions category of my site:
http://mydomain.com/products/televisions/*
I want the automation to run when any product in the television category is viewed so I add an asterisk that serves as a wildcard. Now the automation will run whether the contact visits:
- http://mydomain.com/products/televisions/48-inch-tvs
- http://mydomain.com/products/televisions/60-inch-tvs
- http://mydomain.com/products/televisions/sales/tvs-on-sale
7. Now set the automation to run “Multiple Times” so that the automation runs each time the contact views a page in the televisions directory.
8. Click “Add Start.”
9. Click the “+” button to add an action to your automation. Click “Conditions and Workflow” and then click “If / Else.” The “If / Else” action creates a fork in the automation based on conditions you define. Contacts who match your conditions will travel down the “Yes” path and contacts who don't will go down the “No” path.
We want to separate contacts who have visited the televisions category 2-5 times from all others. If a contact only visits the category once, they may have accidentally clicked into it. If they've visited twice, it's safe to assume they are interested.
If they have visited 2-5 times they will travel down the “Yes” path. Let's add an action that applies a tag to indicate they are interested in televisions.
10. Click the “+” button, click the “Contacts” category, and then click “Add tag.”
You might use the tag:
- [Interest] Televisions
- Interested in televisions
- Interest: Televisions
How you choose to format your tags is a matter of personal preference but it's a good idea to plan out a system that makes sense and then stick to it. For more tagging best practices, see our article on that topic.
Contacts that go down the “No” path will exit the automation.
11. Give your automation a descriptive name such as “Interest Tagging for Televisions.”
12. Click the “Active / Inactive” toggle to make your automation active.
You may want to create a label so that you can group all your interest tagging automations together.
Read the "How to use naming conventions to stay organized" guide for more tips.
The web pages your contact chooses to view indicate where their interests lay. You might think of their page views as telling you which content, information, products, or features are most important to them. Once you've surmised their interests from their page views, you can send them targeted messages with content and offers that align with their interests. This will increase the relevance of your messages so they'll be more likely to read them. You'll have a better relationship with your contacts because what you send them is interesting to them.