This article provides some introductory information that we think you'll find useful as you prepare to use Web Tracking in Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional).

Web Tracking is a powerful feature of Thrive Marketing Professional that allows you to track three types of user activity on your website:

• Page Tracking tracks page views and how much time users spend on a page.
• Interaction Tracking tracks a variety of user interactions, such as playing videos, submitting forms, downloading whitepapers, and searching for content.
• Purchase Tracking tracks purchases (e.g., membership renewals, item purchases) and other transactions that users make on your website.

Web Tracking is possible because Higher Logic provides you with snippets of tracking code that are unique to your account and which have to be added to the specific domains that you want to track.

Tracking codes

Enable Web Tracking describes how to retrieve the tracking codes and how to add the codes to domains on which you want to track user activities.

Now that you understand the basics of Web Tracking, let's look at some of the necessary preparation for, and best practices of, your Web Tracking efforts.

Watch the video

Web Tracking in action

How Web Tracking works is fairly simple.

1. When one of your message recipients (a contact) clicks a link — in one of your mailings — that launches a web browser, a cookie is automatically installed on that browser.
2. As long as that cookie remains installed on that browser, and as long as that contact uses that browser to visit your website, Thrive Marketing Professional can:

• • identify that contact and
  • track and record every trackable interaction that contact has with your site.

After Web Tracking has been installed and tested, consider sending messages that contain links so that those cookies are installed as quickly as possible, so that you can start tracking contact interactions.

Consider sending a message that requires recipients to click a link to, for example, confirm their personal details and/or mailing preferences.

TIP: Keep in Mind - The more clicks that you get, the more contact interactions with your site you'll be able to track.

Plan which user activities to capture

You can set up the Web Tracking to track a variety of user activities that occur on your website (e.g., page views, downloading a white paper, clicking a link). However, you should take time to compile a list of all the user interactions that your organization actually wants to track and have reported on, as opposed to tracking "everything" and ending up with a lot of data that you aren't interested in.

A good place to start is to list the interactions that are possible on your website. For example, if your website:

• offers coffee mugs for sale, then tracking visitor purchases might be worthwhile in order to determine monthly sales of a particular mug.
• doesn't have white papers, then the above-mentioned "downloading a white paper" isn't applicable to your tracking efforts.

Manage your web site pages & content

After you've planned which user activities to track and set up Web Tracking, website maintenance becomes very important — especially if page content or a URL is changed.

Make sure that:

• the pages on your site that users are being directed to are loading properly,
• users are finding what you've directed them there for, and
• any items you're tracking as an Interaction are still present and working properly.

Consider the cost

If your organization doesn't have its own web developer, you might be contracting a vendor for your website updates and maintenance.

Therefore, the better your Web Tracking planning (before the codes are installed), the less work there will be for the vendor, so you'll keep your costs down and minimize the likelihood of costly revisions or fixes.

Balance user privacy and successful tracking

When tracking any user actions, it is paramount that you consider user privacy and maintain an understanding of how your users might feel about being targeted based on their interactions on your site.

Try to be as selective as possible in how you use Web Tracking to target their interactions and to send personalized mailings.

• Identify the highest value interactions.
• Establish limits for your tracking and stick to them.

However...

While adhering to the abovementioned considerations, you have to also consider the viability of your tracking efforts. The Web Tracking cookie will be lost if users:

• clear their cookies,
• reinstall their browser, and/or
• use a different computer or device.

To ensure your tracking, periodically send an email message that requires users to click a link. This will re-establish the cookie and ensure that you're tracking is intact.

Page tags

Page tags enable you to group several "related" pages on your site for Web Tracking. Pages can be "related" based on any criterion you want, as demonstrated in the following example.

Example

You've created seven pages on your site for an upcoming event. Assume:

• You do not want to know about every contact interaction on each of the seven pages, but
• You do want to know about all of the contact interactions as a whole across the seven pages.

To achieve this, tag each of the seven pages. The web tracking results for all of them are then consolidated under one page tag.

TIP: The contact-interaction-per-page data is still available if you want to view it, but using page tags has enabled you to consolidate the contact-interactions metrics at a higher-level.

NOTE: Page tags are created and managed by Higher Logic, so you won't have to involve a web developer.

To learn more about page tags in reports, see Tagged Pages in the Web Tracking Report.

Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager

Web Tracking is very similar to Google Analytics (and it peacefully coexists with it), and allows you to harness Google Analytics data for your digital-marketing efforts.

You can use Web Tracking with Thrive Marketing Professional and Google Tag Manager. To learn how, see Web Tracking in Google Tag Manager.