Web behavior tracking is a powerful tool that provides you with greater insight into how customers and prospects interact with your website, meaning you can deliver even more relevant and effective content and communications.
When you implement the Dotdigital Tag on your website, you have the option to enable web behavior tracking.
Learn more in Add the Dotdigital Tag to your website.
This allows the capture, collection and storage of browsing details against your contacts as Insight data records.
Web behavior tracking explained
In Dotdigital, web browsing data is stored in the WebInsight data collection. This data allows you to follow your customers' and prospects' activity on your website after they've clicked through from one of your campaigns.
Browsing activity is captured, stored, and then made available for use in segmentation and personalisation. WebInsight data is also used to power certain types of product recommendations.
When you enable web behavior tracking, the Dotdigital Tag collects information such as:
Page/pages viewed by a contact - this includes page title, page URL, and date and time of the view.
Duration of views, in minutes.
Total number of pages viewed in the visit.
Website visited, as it may be the case that you have more than one website.
User-agent - the type of browser being used by the contact to view your website.
IP address of the contact.
Google Analytics tracking information is also collected if your account and web pages are configured for it.
You can also customise the Dotdigital Tag to:
Capture custom events from your site.
Perform front-end identification of a contact on your website when they enter an email address, such as during a checkout or a newsletter subscription.
Enable abandoned browse and abandoned cart functionality.
Contact identification and webInsight data
Once your developers have implemented the Dotdigital Tag on your site, with Web behavior tracking enabled, it takes up to an hour for tracking data from your website to appear in Dotdigital.
Contacts viewing your tracked pages are anonymous until either:
they’re de-anonymised by Dotdigital after clicking through to a tracked page from one of your campaigns
or
they’re de-anonymised through front-end identification, meaning they have submitted their email address to your site.
For this, your developers need to extend the Dotdigital Tag to implement the Identify method, which allows your site to provide us with channel identifiers such as email address and mobile number.
Learn more in our developer documentation.
Example
Day 1: A contact clicks through from an email campaign to a website with web behavior tracking enabled; we track the session.
Day 2: The contact revisits the website organically; we track the session.
Day 3: The contact clicks through from another email; we track the session.
De-anonymised data is kept for 365 days from the last time the contact identified themselves, so if a contact continues visiting from campaigns, this period keeps resetting.
We store anonymous data for 30 days (a session). A session is any activity that occurs on a domain between the time a user arrives and the session expires.
If we identify a contact on day 30, all the previous browsing from that time is saved against the contact record. If we identify the contact on day 40, then only the session data from the previous 30 days is saved; the data from the first 10 days is not associated to the contact record.
Examples
Day 1: An anonymous user visits the site organically.
Day 11: The anonymous user visits the site again.
Day 30: The contact clicks through from an email and becomes de-anonymous; we associate the records for days 1, 11 and 30 to the contact record.
Day 1: An anonymous user visits the site organically.
Day 11: The anonymous user visits the site again.
Day 40: The contact clicks through from an email and becomes de-anonymous; we associate the records for day 11 and 40, but not day 1.