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Introduction to web activity tracking

Web activity tracking in Engage is the online tracking of a contact's website activity. Using cookies, it allows the activity of both anonymous and identified contacts to be tracked.

Reading this guide will help you to understand about:

  • Identification and cookies

  • Abandoned carts

  • Product views

Identification and cookies

The foundation of web activity tracking is identification and cookies. A contact can be identified through the script in two ways:

  • Through an email link (sent from Engage) that takes them to the website.

  • Through being identified by the website by, for example, signing in, in which case the method setContactId() is called.

The script, once implemented, will generate a unique client ID and store it in a first-party cookie named _va. All web activity on that browser will then be linked to that client ID via the cookie. When that user clicks on a link in an email from Engage, the tracking script reads the contact ID from the URL (vtid) and stores it in a cookie named _vaI. With this method, all web activity can be connected to a specific contact in Engage.

Read more about identification here.

Abandoned cart

The tracking script enables abandoned cart functionality. By registering every state of a user’s cart, Engage is able to receive information about cart abandonment and use this to trigger automation workflows.

How to get started:

If you want to learn more about abandoned cart from a user's perspective, check out Help Center.

Products of interest

By tracking which products a user interacts with, Engage can calculate a list of products of interest. This can then be used in, for example, segmentations. This data will also be a part of the algorithm that calculates Engage's product recommendations.

In this section: