Site Tracking is a powerful feature that connects your recruitment and marketing efforts with the activity on your website. It allows your CRM to monitor website visits in real-time and respond as contacts engage with specific academic programs or webpages, such as admissions, financial aid, or student life, among others.
How does Site Tracking work?
Site tracking shows you which pages on your website were visited by known contacts.
To use this feature, whitelist your URL on the Settings>Tracking page in your eduCRM account. We then provide you with a tracking code. You need to add this code to the footer of every page on your website that you wish to track visits to. This tracking code sends page view data to the CRM.
Only one site tracking code is generated. If you want to track multiple sites, you should use this one site tracking code on all sites.
We do not support placing the site tracking code through third-party platforms, such as Google Tag Manager, as doing so can cause issues with tracking. The code should be placed directly on the website.
We use first-party cookies to track visits to each page on your site that has the eduCRM tracking code installed. A first-party cookie is defined as a cookie created by the domain being visited by the contact.
When a contact visits your site, their web browser saves data files to their computer under the website's name. This provides transparency to your contacts about where these tracking cookies originate and where their information is stored.
First-party cookies cannot be shared or transferred between websites. This is to ensure the security of your contacts. If you have multiple websites listed in your account that use site tracking, you'll need to identify contacts for each site in order to track their page visits.
In order to associate page view data with a specific contact, it is essential to identify that contact. This process enables us to link page visits to their email address. The page visit data is then stored in your account, where it can be accessed in the contact's record as well as in the segment builder.
How contacts are identified
There are three ways to identify contacts who visit your page:
1. When contacts click on a link in a campaign.
The link that the contact clicks must direct them to a whitelisted page on your website that has the site tracking code installed. We will append information to the link that allows us to identify the contact who clicked on your campaign link and visited your webpage. This additional information should not be visible to the end user.
Site tracking is not supported in 1:1 emails.
2. When they submit a form created in the CRM.
When a contact submits your eduCRM form, they should be redirected to a page on your website that has the site tracking code installed. The default "Thank You" page provided by forms will not create a tracking cookie for your contacts.
We are not able to identify visitors who submit a third-party form.
When a contact submits an eduCRM form, previously anonymous site visits may be associated to their new contact record:
- The system will check site visits in the past 30 days. In some instances it could be up to a year if a contact's cookies exist
- If a user visits a site using different browsers, incognito mode, or clears their cookies, previous site visits may not be retrieved.
3. By dynamically inserting the email address of known visitors into the tracking code.
If you've already identified a contact by their email address, you can insert their email address into the site tracking javascript code. See the section titled "How to pass a contact's email address into javascript code" below for more information.
Only page view data collected after the identification of the contact will be shown on their contact profile page.
Learn about Site Tracking and the GDPR.
How to pass a contact's email address into javascript code
If you have already identified a contact by their email address, you can include that address in the site tracking JavaScript code. For example, if you have a portal, you might be able to recognize them after they log in.
To do this, you will need to add the following line to the tracking code:
vgo('setEmail', 'Email_Address_Goes_Here');
above this line:
vgo('process');
If you find this information too technical, you don't have to use this option. You can still track contacts through form submissions and link clicks. However, if you have the technical skills, this additional option is available for you to use.
Once the code is on your site, and you've whitelisted your domains, The CRM will begin collecting data and adding it to your contact records as contacts are identified.
How to set up Site Tracking
Site Tracking is quick and easy to set up. We recommend that everyone set up Site Tracking because it's a core feature that enables more powerful enrollment marketing and recruitment processes.
Learn how to set up site tracking.
How is Site Tracking different than your analytics solution?
Analytics solutions like Google Analytics provide statistics on website activity. This aggregated data is designed to identify trends and issues related to your website.
Site Tracking provides valuable insights into the actions of individual contacts on your website. More importantly, it enables you to automatically create personalized experiences for each contact as they interact with your site.
Using Site Tracking to improve your business processes
Site Tracking enables the creation of enrollment marketing and recruitment processes that utilize behavioral targeting, triggered messages, and detailed segmentation, all of which enhance the contact experience and boost conversions.
- Trigger a message with an application waiver code to send 30 minutes after a contact views your admissions requirements but didn't make a purchase
- Apply a tag to indicate a contact's interest and begin a targeted follow-up sequence after two or more visits to a specific major
- Fork an automation so you treat a contact differently if they've already viewed a certain page of your site
- Trigger automations when a contact views a page on your site
- Automatically increase a prospective student's score to when they view three or more important pages of your website (such as your admission criteria, academic programs, and financial aid)
- Increase or decrease a contact or lead score based on visits and views of specific pages.
- Personalize the content of your campaigns based on what categories of your site a contact has repeatedly viewed
By integrating Site Tracking data with other behavioral insights, such as email campaign opens, link clicks, videos watched, and form submissions, you can determine which information are most relevant and interesting to each contact, creating a positive feedback loop that leads to more engaged students and increased conversions.