Web Tracking FAQ Overview
This article answers the frequently asked questions about Web Tracking. Check out the full list of questions below and click through to find the answer.
Contents
General
Reporting
Troubleshooting
Will links clicked in a Form Notification Email drop a cookie on the clicked recipient's machine?
Yes. As long as the URL that is clicked within the Form Notification email points to a web-page that has the Vuture Web Tracking Code on it, the cookie will be dropped.
A great way to utilize this is to use a Form Notification to send a 'Thank You for subscribing' or 'Welcome Email' with a link to your website, upon submitting your Subscription form. This 'Welcome Email' can include specific CTAs (Call to Actions) to different areas of your website (i.e. check out the latest blog post, upcoming events, etc.). When the new subscriber clicks on one of the CTA links in the Welcome Email, a cookie will be dropped to start tracking this new subscriber in Vuture's Web Tracking reporting.
If you have Triggers, you can use these step-by-step instructions to automate your welcome email.
How long does the web tracking cookie last for?
Vuture's web tracking cookie lasts for 1 year by default. See the Web Tracking Privacy Compliance and other Cookies article for more information.
The system considers a session ended when the gap between page visits is one hour or more. Is it possible to change that timeout gap?
Unfortunately it is currently it is not possible to change this value.
With InterAction, can you exclude activities from certain individuals, for example to block activities being written back for internal users?
Unfortunately that is currently not possible and activities would have to be manually removed from the CRM.
Reporting
What reporting do I have access to with Vuture's Web Tracking?
Once web tracking has been enabled, you'll have access to the following reporting:
Note on Time Zones and Reporting Discrepancies
Web tracking activities are all recorded in the UK time zone for all Vuture clients, irrespective of where that client is based. The reporting Start Date and End Date are in the Time Zone of the user accessing the report. This is not a bug, but is how the product is built and intended to work.
This means that when generating reports, users need to factor in their time zone differences to the report dates.
For example, if a user in the EST time zone selects the start date 29/12/2022, they are 5 hours behind the UK and the start date will be converted to 28/12/2022 and will therefore not return any results. If the user selects the start date 30/12/2022, the date will be converted to 29/12/2022 and it will display results.
Dashboard - Minutes on page stats – Can you confirm why it’s saying ‘>10’ under the heading ‘minutes on page’ even if I’ve been on the page for less than a minute?
The logic behind calculating 'Minutes on page' is as follows: We record the accessed time of every URL when it is being visited. The accessed time difference between two successive visited pages is how many minutes the user has been on the first page.
Example:
Let’s say we have two pages to visit. If the user visits the first page now, then the accessed time will be recorded as 2022/12/08 10:17:00.
If the user then goes to the next page ( From the first page ), then the accessed time will be recorded at 2022/12/08 10:20:00.
The time difference between the accessed time of these two visits is how many minutes the user has been on the first page. In this case, Minutes on the first page are 3 mins. It goes on for every successive page visit.
So here is where the question of last visited page comes. Since it is the last visited page ,we have no more pages visited next to that. So we don’t have any page (access time) to compare with the last page visit. With the logic we have right now, it fills >10 mins in this scenario.
If a web tracking alert is set up to send regularly, is an email sent if there is no activity?
No. The web tracking alert email will not be sent if the specified individuals (email address) or companies (domains) on that alert did not visit your website within that specified time period.
If the contact clears their cache, I understand the cookie is gone and the 'cycle' starts again to track their activity. Will their previous web tracking activity be linked when the cookie gets dropped again? For example, they clear their cache but then open an email a month later. Will there just be a gap in activity?
Yes, their later activity will be linked, since we know who they are each time. If they cleared their cookies (this is not necessarily the same as clearing your browsing history) then we would start tracking their web visits as soon as they visit the site again.
Even if they then didn't click through from a Vuture email for a while, we would join up their web visit history from when they last cleared their cookies.
Will Web Tracking Visits write back to Vuture Dashboards in real time?
Yes. This is recording in real time to Vuture.
For the Web Leads Dashboard, specifically the Most Popular Web Pages section, does this include known and unknown contacts?
It includes both known and unknown contacts.
I have a client interested in web tracking. They have two instances - one for each part of their business. If the Vuture tracking code is added to their main website, then how is the reporting recorded across their different VX instances? For example, will it default to the VX instance that the contact was emailed from originally? What happens if a contact is known by the same details in multiple VX instances?"
They will need to add a tracking code to their website for each Vx instance. They will track separately. If the same contact exists in more than one instance then only when the contact clicks a link in that instance will they start recording web tracking in that instance.
So to confirm if they have clicked a link from both instances' emails in the past and have a direct web visit tomorrow - both instances should show that visit?
Correct
If a contact is an "unknown" contact who is viewing a clients website but then later becomes a known contact- will their Web Tracking activity from when they were an unknown contact show in IA?
You will see the historic visits in the reporting in Vuture but we will not retrospectively write back activities to IA
Is there layered reporting available in the Web Tracking module to provide more data on which links were clicked within an email?
In the Data Warehouse each web tracking record in the MarketingActivity table will have a value in the EmailHistoryId column.
This value refers to the specific email send to that contact and they can look up records in the MarketingActivity table with that EmailHistoryId and ActivityType = 'Email Link Clicked' to find links clicked by that contact.
This EmailHistoryId is retained between website visits so clients may need to do some filtering on date.
Troubleshooting
The web tracking is not identifying people in Internet Explorer when used on certain websites
Make sure that the websites you are tracking are in the same security zone as the Vuture web tracking URL you were provided with.
Internet Explorer can store cookies in different folders for sites in different security zones, typically:
C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies - for trusted sites
and
C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low - for sites where Internet Explorer is running in Protected Mode.
If cookies for your websites to be tracked are in a different folder to the cookie from the Vuture tracking code then they cannot be read by each other.
The simplest solution is usually to add all your websites to be tracked and the URL for the Vuture tracking code into your Trusted Sites list in Internet Explorer. If your IT department is using Group Policy for your Internet Explorer settings them please ask them to update the Trusted Sites list accordingly.
The web tracking report is only showing the domain of the page visit.
Some modern browsers have changed their default referrer policy, for example Chrome's default referrer policy is now "strict-origin-when-cross-origin". This means that only a partial request referrer is included in web requests to different domains. The web tracking request to Vuture is a cross domain request so only partial information is sent, and in turn Vuture is unable to record the exact destination of a page visit. This reduced tracking information translates to only the domain being shown in reporting.
Solution:
The website needs to be updated to have a referrer policy set in the <head> of the html. This can be done by pasting the snippet in the head tag:
<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">
