How to Set Up Tracking on a Custom System

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When setting up Tracking on your website there are a few requirements to be met, and based on your website we will be able to track the behavior of your visitors to various extents.

We categorize websites into three different categories.

  • Standard systems like native WooCommerce or Magento
  • Standard systems as above, but with custom plugins installed in key areas
  • Custom systems or systems that are unknown to us.

We will be able to natively track all of the pages your visitors visit in all three categories. Events such as adding and removing products from baskets will vary depending on your system.

The guide below is for custom shop systems and systems that are unknown to us.

By the end of this guide, you will have set up Tracking and synchronization to handle the following

Contact Date

  • Flat data such as name, birthday, and permission (with the use of Connector or API)
  • Deep transactional data (with the use of Connector or API)

Events

  • Page visited
  • Product visited
  • Category visited
  • Product/category added to cart (with the use of Google-tag-manager)
  • Product/category removed from the cart (with the use of Google-tag-manager)
  • Product/category bought (with or without the use of Google-tag-manager)

Step 1. Create Product Feed and Sitemap

A screenshot from the interface of MarketingPlatform, picturing the instructions to set up Tracking on a custom system.

First off you will have to add your Product Feed and the Sitemap to your webshop. This is a requirement since the very heart of Tracking requires us to know your Products and pages in order to record who has visited what.

In-depth details about setting up Feeds and Sitemaps can be found here.

Step 2. Setup Tracking

A screenshot from the interface of MarketingPlatform, picturing the instructions to set up Tracking on a custom system.

With the Product Feed and Sitemap added we can now set up the Tracking. In the Tracking, you are able to tell us which element in your Product Feed is the Category, Product ID, Sales Price, etc. This will be used in Segments and bridging the Tracking information with the Order data saved in One-to-Many empowering you to target Contacts who have or have not bought, have visited but not bought, etc. from a specific Product Category, Price range, etc.

If we do not detect your webshop you will have to map this manually.

In order to be empowered with the full potential of the benefits of Tracking it is required to map at least the following:

  • Product Events
  • Product Link
  • Product Category
  • Product ID
  • Cart Page
  • Checkout 
  • Thank You Page.

It is advised to map more, but not required.

You have now set up enough for us to track what is highlighted with green at the top of this article:

Events

  • Page visited
  • Product visited
  • Category visited

 

Contact Data

In order to synchronize Contact Data you can set up a Connector(link to connector wiki) or use our API (link to API documentation). With that, you will have set up the following Contact Data:

Contact Data

  • Flat data such as name, birthday, and permission (with the use of Connector or API)
  • Deep transactional data (with the use of Connector or API)

 

Events

In order to synchronize the events highlighted in yellow at the top of this article, you can manually tell us when these events occur. 

  • Product/category added to cart (with the use of Google-tag-manager)
  • Product/category removed from cart (with the use of Google-tag-manager)
  • Product/category bought (with or without the use of Google-tag-manager)

We advise the use of Google Tag-manager since most webshops have installation tutorials for Google Tag-manager and it is widely used by most websites.

A screenshot from the interface of Google Tag Manager, picturing the instructions to Set Up Tracking on a custom system.These are the data we need for each event

You can simply create a custom event using Google tag-manager to tell us when things happen depending on the Trigger you choose.

A screenshot from the interface of Google Tag Manager, picturing the instructions to Set Up Tracking on a custom system.Creating a custom HTML in Google tag-manager

Creating a Custom HTML Tag as above requires two things to send us the data:

  1. You need the ProductID as a variable in order to send it to us
  2. You need to have your event setup as a Trigger to fire the above Tag

 

The visitors’ journey and congruence between Sitemap, site, and product feed.

For us to combine the knowledge of which products have been browsed and added to cart there are two important elements in the product feeds that bind the Sitemap and webshop together.

  1. Product link. When a customer is visiting a site, we are checking the mapped “Product Link (URL)” and find the product he visited. From that we can see the product id and thereby the category, price etc for the product he visited. It is important that the mapped element for “Product Link (URL)” contains the link in a format shown below

A screenshot from the Product Link (URL), picturing the instructions to Set Up Tracking on a custom system.

A graphical illustration, picturing how the process of Tracking on a custom system works.

2. Product Unique Identifier (id). When a product is added to cart it is not visible in the URL alone, and there are many ways for the customer to add an item to the cart without being on the product page itself (search results, main pages with a list of products, and an add-to-cart option, etc.).

Most webshops are saying that a specific product id has been added to the basket.  For the standard systems we know what that looks like, so all you need to do is to map the “Product Unique Identifier (id) with what is the product id used on the webshop.

It is important that the product ids are the same on the webshop and in the Product Feed – since when the shop is telling us a customer has added Product id “421” to the cart, we will check for product “421” in the Product Feed. If the ids are not the same – there will be no matches found and we will not know which product he added and have nothing to insert in Campaigns or show in Segments.

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