Data Integration - Tracker

Marigold Engage provides multiple tracking systems to analyze known or unknown contact's behavior using various on-line environments, whether it is your own organizational web site, an on-line product catalog, or social media interfaces. Proper tracking can give you more accurate and reliable answers to many marketing questions and allows making important marketing decisions based on facts instead of guesswork or theories.

The Trackers overview shows all configured trackers, in alphabetical order (by name).
Each row contains the tracker name, last modified date/time and icons to edit and delete the tracker.

The overview can be sorted by clicking on a column header.

The Search field at the top-right allows searching in the list of trackers based on name.

From this overview you can

  • Create a new tracker — See below.
  • Edit an existing tracker — By clicking on a tracker name. The properties are then displayed in a right sliding panel.
  • Delete an existing tracker — By clicking on the bin icon.

 

Create a tracker

 You can add trackers to trace customer behavior when defining a web tracking process.

To create a new tracker, click on the New button at the top-right.
The properties are then shown in a right sliding panel.

The following fields can be configured (the ones with an asterisk are required fields) :

  • Name* — Enter a unique name for the tracker. The name of the tracker itself isn't important, just a reference for later recognition.
  • Domains — Enter all the domains for which this tracker should be applied. By setting (a) domain(s) here, the tracker will only be used for those domains.
    A domain name needs to be entered as follows: *parana.com.

    Some examples domains are:
    website.org - works for http://website.org and http://website.org/products/, but not for https://login.website.org
    shop.website.org - works for links to https://shop.website.org, but will miss https://website.org links
    *website.org - works for https://shop.website.org, https://website.org, https://buy.website.org, https://login.website.org/personal/ etc.
    .website.org - not permitted
    *website* - not permitted: may need both website.org and website.com if using both domains.


    Hence it is preferred to add the wildcard to the beginning to include all subdomains off that domain.

    Note: It may take 5 mins to kick in. Changes on the 5-mins mark? Changes to tags are fairly instant! Changes to domains aren't always fast. Also a warning about too many domains slowing down matches

  • Move the parameters generated by the tracker to the front — When this option is selected, parameters are placed at the beginning of the Query string. When using a tracker, Engage parameters are, by default, added at the end of the URL. But sometimes this results in very long URLs and not all CMS systems support them. With this option, you can ensure that the Engage parameters are always included in the URL.
  • Activate the required trackers by toggling them on/off:
    • Engage webtracker — Sets up web sensors for web tracking.
    • Google Analytics — Enables Google Analytics tracking system. All fields available in the table are updated with Google Analytics parameters.
    • Lotame — Tags sensors pointing to the domain specified in the tracker with a Lotame parameter.
    • Custom — Defines a custom web tracking process. Anything you define in here can be added to the URL. A custom tracker allows using functions or profile fields .
      • When enabling the 'Custom' toggle, at least one tag and value are required.
      • An additional line automatically appears each time you've added a tag and value. That way, you can add additional custom tracker tags with values.
      • A bin icon is available to delete them. Keep in mind that a minimum of one tag with a value is required (validation errors appear if this is not the case).
      • Custom trackers need to have a unique tag name.

If additional parameters are required for a tracker, they are shown when a user enables the toggle (eg. Google Analytics).

The user then needs to set all required fields.

When done, click Save to create the tracker. The Tracker is not active instantly but only after a few minutes.

Note :
When saving a tracker, your configuration is validated. Inconsistencies result in errors to be shown. In that case, rectify your setup and save again.

 

Assign a Tracker to one or more organizations

Once the tracker has been defined, the last part is to assign the tracker to one (or many) organizations so that content within those organizations will catch the attention of the tracker, transforming any links matching that domain, e.g.:

This means any links added to communications in the Playground organization containing website.org in the URL will be transformed to include additional tracking information.

 

Adding links to an email in this organization

Setting tracking up in this way means that ALL links matching that domain will be affected throughout every communication for that organization, i.e.: the specified keys and values will be added to every link.

For an email that contains a number of links, here is what happens:

  • A link to https://website.org/ becomes https://webshop.org/?source=engage - note that these parameters aren't shown for the links in the email, but can be seen in the browser once clicked.

  • https://website.org/list.asp becomes https://website.org/list.asp?source=engage

  • https://website.org/list.asp?item=42 becomes https://website.org/list.asp?item=42&source=engage

When the Move the parameters generated by the tracker to the front option is enabled:

Then: https://website.org/list.asp?item=42
becomes https://website.org/list.asp?source=engage&item=42

Note that the tracker may have multiple key/value pairs, so adding a further pair of:

… means:

https://website.org/list.asp?item=42 becomes https://website.org/list.asp?item=42&source=engage&org=production

Link-specific tags

What if we wanted to distinguish between links by providing different values for them? For example, one link may refer to a New Year sale, another for a Summer sale. This can be performed by editing the link then appending the respective key/value (e.g.: &sale=summer) to the end of that specific link:

Similarly, &sale=newyear will be added to the end of another link.

However, that requires a marketer to know in advance what the key names are (sale, in this case).

An alternative way is to use a placeholder of [%webAnalyticsTag('link')%] in the tracker's value:

The sale key will then be populated with any value specified in the "Advanced" section of the link:

Journey-specific tags

What if two different emails needed some way of identifying which communication was responsible for the click, i.e.: we wanted to know if the purchase had occurred as a result of email B rather than email A?

One way would be to manually amend all links in the first emails, appending "&source=A" to each link, then "&source=B" for all links in the second email. Or, as the method suggests above, we add a key of source to the tracker's config, then simply populate A or B in the advanced section for every link.

However, this is onerous and somewhat error-prone - plus defeats the point of adding link-specific values if it's the same value throughout the entire email.

Luckily, a feature exists to set values for all channels used throughout a specific journey: adding values here in the journey:

This will populate the value of the placeholders [%webAnalyticsTag('campaign')%] and [%webAnalyticsTag('message')%] appropriately:

  • [%webAnalyticsTag('campaign')%] contains the value stored in the field "Campaign Analytics Tag"

  • [%webAnalyticsTag('message')%] contains the value stored in the field "Message Analytics Tag"

For example, if the tracker showed:

Then adding "summer" to the Campaign Analytics tag means all these journey links in all communications in that journey will be transformed:

https://website.org/list.asp?item=42 becomes https://website.org/list.asp?item=42&offer=summer

Summary:
Tracking information can be added at different levels of granularity throughout the platform.
- Add to all links in all communication channels matching a specific domain
- Add to all links in all communications for this specific journey
- Add this value to this individual link in this communication
- Add a specific key and value to an individual link in this communication