Web Tracking is a powerful and useful feature of Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) that your organization can customize in order to better understand how users visit your website and what they do while on your site.

You can track as many as three types of user activities that occur on your website.

Why track these activities?

When you track user visits to and activities on your website, you get a deeper insight into which users are visiting and how they are interacting with the site content. You can more easily learn which pages are being accessed more than others; how visitors engage with one type of content versus another; and which of your collateral (e.g., videos, forms, sale items) get more attention.

With this type of insight into user activities on and interactions with your site, you can:

• view account-wide and message-specific tracking reports,
• send targeted email messages, and
• build Target Groups to feed your campaigns.

How Web Tracking works

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

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.

Then...

1. You send an email message that contains a link to a "tagged" page on a domain that you are tracking.
2. When a message recipient (a contact) clicks that link, it launches a web browser which navigates to the linked page.
3. The account-specific Higher Logic-provided snippet of code that was added to your domain automatically installs a cookie on that contact's browser.

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 that contact's "web-tracked" activities on your site.

NOTE: The contact is now a "known user" in the Thrive Marketing Professional system; as such, their activity will be tracked unless/until they: clear the browser cookies, reinstall the browser, or use a different computer or device.

Send a set-up message

After Web Tracking has been installed and tested, Higher Logic recommends that you send at least one message that contains at least one link in order to get those cookies installed as soon as possible, so that you can start tracking contact activities.

TIP: Send a simple message that requires recipients to click a link to, for example, confirm their personal details and/or verify or update their mailing preferences.

The more clicks that you get, the more contact activities that'll be included in your reports, making them more useful and insightful.

Plan which 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 website 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 changes.

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 that you're tracking as an Interaction still exist and work properly.

Consider the cost

If your organization doesn't have an in-house web developer, you might be contracting a vendor for site 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 user 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, see Web Tracking Page Tags - Creating, Tagging, & Reporting.

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.