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 three ways:
An email link (sent from Engage) that takes them to the website.
Being identified by the website by, for example, signing in, in which case the method setContactId() is called.
Being identified by an exiting _vaI cookie, previously set by the Voyado script.
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:
Configure a product feed, read more here.
Implement the tracking script, read more here.
Track cart changes, read more here.
If you want to learn more about abandoned cart from a user's perspective, check out Help Center.
Abandoned browse
The tracking script enables abandoned browse functionality, in the same way as abandoned cart. The site sends product view and cart events to Engage through the tracking script (or the API if the user has been identified). Using this Engage can detect when a session is abandoned and nothing has been added to the cart and then trigger an automation.
How to get started:
Implement everything for Abandoned cart, see above
Track product views, including locale read more here.
If you want to learn more about abandoned browse 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.
Configure a product feed, read more here.
Implement the tracking script, read more here.
Track product views, read more here.
Important
Products of interest are connected to the article register, and not to the product feed.
Working with sessionId
The sessionId value is unique for every session. When using the tracking script, it is included automatically in the data sent. However if you are using the API to handle web activity tracking, the sessionId needs to be manually added to the payload that you send.
While the sessionId value is not mandatory for Abandoned Cart events, it will need to be included if the retailer is using Abandoned Browse and Abandoned Cart together. This is to prevent both automations from being triggered based on the same sessionId.
Engage will check if "cart" and "productView" events are using the same sessionId. If they are, then only the Abandoned Cart automation in Engage will be triggered. The Abandoned Browse automation will only get triggered if there are no cart events registered during the session that has that specific sessionId.
To summarise:
Every session has a unique sessionId
This gets added automatically when using the tracking script
It needs to be manually added to the payload when using the tracking API
Engage uses sessionId to avoid triggering both automations for the same session