Introduction to Web behaviour tracking

Overview

Web behaviour tracking is an advanced module giving you the power to collect identifiable contact data from your site, based on your contacts' browsing behaviour.

In Engagement Cloud, data collected from the web behaviour tracking is stored as WebInsight data. This data allows you to harness 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.

Your Web Behavior Tracking, when added to the pages of your website, will collect information which includes:

• Page/pages viewed by a contact (this includes page title, page URL, and date and time of the view)
• Duration of views (which is recorded in minutes)
• Total number of pages viewed in a visit by a contact
• Website visited (because 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
• Plus Google Analytics tracking information, if your account and web pages are configured with it

This code will also provide you with the ability to:

• Send custom page values with 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

Web Behavior Tracking provides you with space to store this data, allowing you to leverage it to profile and identify the interests and needs of potential, as well as existing, customers. Use our drag and drop segment tool to create simple or complex segments to send targeted content to. Furthermore, use Web Behavior Tracking in tandem with triggers or the program builder to automate your campaign sends.

Check out our guide to using Web Behavior Tracking segmentation.

Using Web Behavior Tracking

You can use Web Behavior Tracking to:

• Spur customers on towards a purchase. Based on either cart abandonment or product pages viewed, this insight can be used to 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, for instance, with pages promoting them having been viewed but abandoned by contacts before a download has been made.
• Send follow-up campaigns to contacts coming from a campaign or advert placed externally, such as on Facebook. Use Web Behavior Tracking to target contacts clicking directly through and visiting your pages from a source external to your site, and combine this with the program builder to automate the sending of follow-up campaigns.

Benefits of Web Behavior Tracking

• 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

In short, Web Behavior Tracking enables you to go much further, empowering you to maximise lead and sales opportunities with speed and ease.

Collecting data with Web Behavior Tracking

Web Behavior Tracking collects data in the following way:

• Once Web Behavior Tracking is purchased and activated, the tracking code can either be added to 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 Engagement Cloud
• Contacts viewing your tracked pages are anonymous until they're either de-anonymised by Engagement Cloud after clicking through to a tracked page from one of your campaigns, or de-anonymised via front-end identification (entering their email address).
  • For example:
    Day 1: A contact clicks through from an email campaign to a website with Web Behavior Tracking code on; we track the session
    Day 2: Contact revisits website organically; we track the session
    Day 3: 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, that's if they keep visiting from campaigns, this period will keep resetting.
  With regards to anonymous data, we store it 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.
  In Engagement Cloud, if you have multiple sub-domains for web behaviour tracking, you can’t track users across the sub-domains as one continuous journey. To track users across multiple sub-domains, the user must be re-identified on each sub-domain. Engagement Cloud then tracks each user as an individual session.
• If we identify you (when a contact is de-anonymised) on day 30, all your previous browsing from that time will be saved against your contact record. If we identify you on day 40, then only your session data from the previous 30 days will be saved, that is not the first 10 days.
  • For example:
    Day 1: An anonymous user visits the site organically
    Day 11: The anonymous user visits the site again
    Day 30: Contact clicks through from an email and becomes de-anonymous; we pull through day 1, 11 and 30
    
    Or it could also be:
    Day 1: An anonymous user visits the site organically
    Day 11: The anonymous user visits the site again
    Day 40: Contact clicks through from an email and becomes de-anonymous; we pull through day 11 and 40, but not day 1
    

  More information

  If you want to find out more about Web Behavior Tracking, how it works and how it could be used to benefit you, then check out the following articles:

  • Using Web Behavior Tracking segmentation
  • Using Web Behavior Tracking to encourage increased sales
  • Using Web Behavior Tracking to increase webform completion
  • Using Web Behavior Tracking to increase website downloads
  • Using Web Behavior Tracking to send follow-up campaigns to contacts coming from an external source