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.
Depending on your account package, Web behavior tracking may be included by default. If not, and you’d like to use it, reach out to your Customer Success representative to discuss adding the feature to your account.
To begin making use of Web behavior tracking, you need to add a snippet of tracking code to the pages of your website that you'd like to track. This enables the capture, collection and storage of browsing details against your contacts as Insight data records.
Learn more in Install Web behavior tracking.
Web behavior tracking can also be installed alongside other features through the Dotdigital Tag. Learn more in Add the Dotdigital Tag to your website.
Benefits of Web behavior tracking
Use Web behavior tracking to:
Enhance your data
Enrich your contact knowledge
Increase engagement with your contacts
Improve your relationship with your customer base
Extend the reach of your service
Potentially speed up your sales process
Ultimately drive up your ROI
Web behavior tracking empowers you to maximise lead and sales opportunities with speed and ease.
Web behavior tracking explained
In Dotdigital, data collected through Web behavior tracking is stored as WebInsight data. 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 creating superior segments with which to target your contacts, enabling you to send content of even greater relevancy.
WebInsight data is also used to power certain types of product recommendations.
Learn more in Product recommendations overview.
The Web behavior tracking script, when added to the pages of your website, 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.
The script also provides you with the ability to:
Send custom page values for each page visit captured, such as a category name or a website section name, to allow for powerful segmentation.
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, which means site visitors can be identified without the need for them to click through from a campaign.
Learn more in the section Install the script.
Once WebInsight data has started to sync into Dotdigital, you can leverage it to profile and identify the interests and needs of potential and existing customers.
Use our drag and drop segment builder to create simple or complex segments to send targeted content to.
Use Web behavior tracking in the program builder to automate your campaign sends.
Learn more in Use Web behavior tracking for segmentation.
Using Web behavior tracking
Liquid personalisation allows you to directly use Web behavior tracking data in your campaigns or landing pages - if you want to include the name of a page a contact has visited, for example.
Learn more in the Liquid section of the Help Centre.
You can also use Web behavior tracking to:
Spur customers on towards a purchase
Based on product pages viewed, you can trigger emails containing relevant product recommendations, offers, testimonials or wishlist details.Encourage contacts to complete abandoned forms
These forms could be for a trial, a quote, or general signup or subscription forms.Directly offer contacts a download, or related downloads
This could be for downloads on your site such as a product guide or whitepaper, with pages promoting them having been viewed but abandoned by contacts before a download has been made.
Collect data with Web behavior tracking
To collect WebInsight data, your developers must add the tracking code to either the header or footer of any web page on your site that you'd like tracked.
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
orthey’re de-anonymised through front-end identification, meaning they have submitted their email address to your site.
Example
Day 1: A contact clicks through from an email campaign to a website with Web behavior tracking code applied; 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.