Web tracking provides a powerful tool to track users' behavior. For example, you can use it to track individual visits to your websites by known contacts and anonymous users.

Note: Anonymous visits are not rolled up for reporting even though the section still appears on the report.

Acoustic Campaign's web tracking allows you also to:

• Target communications to contacts based on behaviors such as page visits, site visits, clicks, downloads, multimedia plays, web form submissions, and even custom events.
• Drive behavioral scoring models.
• Create programs that send a contact a follow-up or "thank you" series of emails in response to visits, page views, downloads, and custom events.
• Reference web tracking events in contact insight.

To access Web tracking reports, go to your left-hand navigation and click Reports > Reports (classic) > Reports center.

You will see a list of reports, with Web tracking reports at the bottom.

If you want to learn more about the possibilities web tracking gives you, visit our Acoustic Academy course.

Web tracking can be configured to track ROI conversions, where you can assign an item and its conversion worth to an event. In addition, it tracks visits and behaviors on your internally hosted landing pages and your external web pages, allowing you to track a contact's behavior as they navigate through your sites, recording actions like visits, hyperlink clicks, document downloads, and media plays.

The data can be linked to individual contacts to target communications based on their web behaviors. Also, for countries that require user consent to allow cookies, you can enable web tracking opt-in functionality. Web tracking for internally hosted landing pages and web forms is enabled by default and doesn't require further configuration.

Benefits to the marketer

In these scenarios, a contact visited the company website encouraging him to sign up for a free trial. The marketer can follow the contact's behaviors by setting up web tracking events and then design an email campaign to turn the free trial into a sale.

1. A contact has watched a product demo video but has not signed up for a free trial. Using web tracking, you can target this contact using a query or program and encourage them to submit the free trial form.
2. A contact signed up for a free trial but hasn't logged in in several days. You can target this contact and encourage them to sign in and use their trial account.
3. Encourage a contact to visit your blog, community forum, or product site. Once the contact has visited the site, you can further market products and services to this contact.
4. As the free trial nears expiration, you can send offers and discounts to encourage the contact to sign up for a paid subscription.
5. The contact has become a paid subscriber, confirmed by a page visit to the order confirmation page or submission of an order form. Use web tracking to follow page views, purchases, and other actions to develop a relationship with the customer.

How web tracking works

1. Your developer adds the primary web tracking meta tag and script to your pages, along with specific JavaScript onClick or onLoad event handlers to track visitor behavior.
2. An email is sent to a contact with a clickstream-enabled link to your web-tracked sites.
3. When the clickstream link is activated, it will first go to a clickstream servlet and insert the first-party cookie into the browser. The cookie will help track the contact's actions.
4. When the visitor triggers an identifying event, such as clicking a Buy Now button, the action is associated with the specific contact's database record and records their web tracking behavior history.

Webform abandonment

It occurs when a web form was rendered or viewed (form visit) but failed to submit (form submit) for more than an hour within the same visit.

Suppose a visitor views the form associated with whitepaper C but does not submit the form within the visit sequence. In that case, the view of whitepaper C will result in abandonment.

Before you begin

You should have a basic understanding of HTML basic JavaScript query strings to work with web tracking. Also, make sure web tracking is enabled in your organization.

What web tracking code does

• Generates the visitor key (the WebSyncID), a unique identifier for each visitor to your tracked sites.
• Stores the WebSyncID in a first-party web browser cookie.
• Records web page visits, clicks, and other events.
• Automatically rewrites URLs to include tracking identifiers when visitors click from one tracked website to another.

Add web tracking code to your site

Before you add the web tracking code to your external site, your organization administrator needs to:

1. Go to Settings > Administration > Organization settings.
2. Click to expand Web Tracking Setting, and scroll down to the Web Tracking Code section.
3. Click Add in qualified domains.
4. Enter the domain in the Domain Name field. Click Save.
5. You need to copy two pieces of code.
   1. Web tracking meta tag: This tag identifies the qualified domains. This code must be placed between the <head></head> tags of your web pages.
   2. Web tracking code: This places the web tracking cookie that inserts the first-party web cookie. This code must appear above the closing </body> tag.

Make sure to add your www and non-www versions of your domains (for example, citycool.com and www.citycool.com).

If your site uses Secure Socket Layer

If your site uses Secure Socket Layer, use the SSL version of the web tracking script.

To add code to the Site to Support Secure Socket Layer (SSL), you must only replace the applicable domain portion with the appropriate secure URL for your organization's pod.

1. Open your browser and go to your website.
2. Open the source view on your web page.
3. Paste the web tracking code into your page's HTML header (or footer) tags.

You can add a code to the site to support Secure Socket Layer (SSL). For example, if your organization is on pod 5, you could replace the domain portion of the web tracking Code with the secure URL for pod 5 only. For more information, refer to the Secure URLs and associated pods table.

Note: If you are using Google Analytics and want to place the web tracking code in the <head> tag, then make sure the web tracking code is above the Google Analytics code.

Subdomains

When tracking external websites, one thing to consider is the transition of the tracking metrics from a parent domain to a subdomain. When your external site contains subdomains, you must ensure that subdomains are accounted for when you qualify a domain in the web tracking settings of your organization's account. For example, if you have a subdomain such as sales.citycool.com, ensure it is included in Settings > Administration > Organization settings > Web tracking settings.

Confirm web tracking is enabled

Several ways to validate web tracking has been successfully configured on your website. After adding the web tracking script and the qualified domains <meta> tag to your site, send a regular email (not a test email) to yourself. The email should contain at least one clickstream link to your external website. Click the clickstream link from your received email to navigate to your external site.

Using Google Chrome

1. Right-click anywhere on your external site and click Inspect.
2. Navigate to the Application tab and expand the Cookies section located under Storage.
3. You should see your domain listed there.
4. Clicking your domain will show you all of the cookies currently available for your domain.
5. The primary first-party web tracking cookie is called "com.silverpop.iMAWebCookie".
6. If this cookie is present, your web tracking script has loaded successfully.

Using Firefox

1. Right-click anywhere on your external site and click Inspect element.
2. Navigate to the Storage tab and expand the Cookies section.
3. You should see your domain listed there.
4. Clicking your domain will show you all the cookies currently available for your domain.
5. The primary first-party web tracking cookie is called "com.silverpop.iMAWebCookie".
6. If this cookie is present, your web tracking script has loaded successfully.

Verify web tracking data

You can verify that your Campaign organization has received the web tracking data you generated.

1. Locate your contact record within the database.
2. Click your email address to view the Edit contact page and click View Contact Insight.
3. Your domain should be visible under the Actions table.
4. Click your domain to view a record of page visit activities.

After an organization administrator configures the settings and provides the code, you can copy and paste the web tracking code into external web pages.

If you do not see the web tracking option in Reporting, it's most likely that the account you are using to access doesn't have landing page access. If that is the case, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > User management.
2. Click on your email address and expand the User Permissions tab you'll find below the User Information section.
3. Select Landing Pages - full access. Remember to click save! Clear the browser's cache or refresh if you don't see the changes. You need admin permissions to modify user accounts.

WebSyncID

The web tracking code generates the webSyncID, a unique identifier for each visitor to your tracked sites. The code stores the webSyncID in a first-party web (browser) cookie and records the web page visits and clicks. The code automatically rewrites URLs to include tracking identifiers when visitors click from one tracked website to another.

Web tracking cookies

When a web page is appropriately set up with web tracking code, each web page visit will generate the following three cookies in the web browser, com.silverpop.iMA.page_visit, com.silverpop.iMA.sessionandcom.silverpop.iMAWebCookie.

If the user visits this web page by clicking a clickstream link, web tracking will generate the following additional cookies:

• com.silverpop.iMA.jid
• com.silverpop.iMA.mid
• com.silverpop.iMA.rid
• com.silverpop.iMA.uid

Web tracking disclaimer

The web-tracking opt-in feature can be optionally placed on any site or web-tracked page. Therefore, it will appear only on the pages you specifically designated and can be customized by your web developer to selectively display to visitors based on their location or language preference.

Use web tracking to reengage customers

How do I create a query-sourced email campaign or an automated program to target customers? You can use web tracking to track conversion events and reengage customers.

If web tracking is enabled on your website, you can create a query-sourced email campaign or create an automated program to target customers. For example, you can configure a custom event to track actions on Buy clicks. You can then use a query or an automated program to gather contacts who did not click Buy.

Consider a scenario where you start a product campaign, and contacts need to complete a transaction or sign up for your webinar. Instead, they visit your site but leave before they click Buy, or they click Buy but do not complete the purchase process.

One way to encourage those users to come back and make a purchase is to use web tracking to reengage them. You can offer supplemental offers or discounts to encourage customers to click Buy and complete the transaction.

The following list is an example of a behavior query or program rule:

• Custom tracking event clicklink named Buy Now not triggered within the last 30 days and views a web page http://gentlemancyclist.com/powerup within the last 30 days.
• Also, you can use Viewed Web Page behavior criteria to find contacts who click the Buy Now, but do not make it through to the sale confirmation page, meaning they abandoned the transaction:
• Web page http://gentlemancyclist.com/orderconfirmation.php not viewed within the last 30 days and viewed web page http://gentlemancyclinst.com/powerup within the last 30 days.

In a program, you can use the preceding examples in a lead route or a decision diamond. You can also create a one-off campaign by using a query source. In both scenarios, you can re-target contacts who did not complete a transaction by offering incentives or create a sense of urgency. Re-targeting might be effective in keeping the contact engaged and interacting with your site and products, increasing the chance of a sale or sign-up.