Plan the collection of visitor data

To make sure your Sitefinity CMS site is collecting the proper type of contact data and sending it to Sitefinity Insight, you need to conduct a thorough analysis of your marketing requirements and reporting needs. You need to plan how to collect data for contacts and their behavior, as well as whether Sitefinity Insight out-of-the-box tracking capabilities, like page visits, will serve your scenario. You may need to implement tracking for custom events and interactions, for example, watching a YouTube video. The following sections give you directions on what to be aware of and help you plan how to collect contact data.

NOTE: You need the visitors' consent to track their data. For more information, see Tracking consent.

In Sitefinity Insight, a visitor is any anonymous person who interacted with your company at least once through any channel. A contact, on the other hand, is a visitor who has provided an email address by which they can be uniquely identified. For more information about profiles, see Contacts and Contact profiles.

Tracking within Sitefinity Insight is accomplished by collecting and sending information for contacts' interactions. Data, provided by your visitors, is collected, stored, and leveraged in the form of contact metadata. It is used to define audiences and segments that you use in all channels for a variety of purposes.

Each customer interaction is a combination of the following three types of data:

• Interactions that describe contacts actions on the website.
• Additional data (metadata) related to the contacts or the objects, which they interact with.
• Mappings.
  Insight uses mappings to relate two contacts by merging all the data for these contacts in a single one. With mappings, multiple contacts, which so far reported data separately, are treated as one contact.

To decide how you collect data, you need to consider your marketing reporting needs. Following are a few examples of how marketing requirements are translated into contact data collection plan:

With Sitefinity Insight, you track key contact interactions on your Sitefinity CMS website. You use the dedicated connector in Sitefinity CMS that handles data input from your site to Sitefinity Insight. Data is collected by tracking the behavior of website visitors. Once you connect, Sitefinity CMS starts sending all tracked contact interactions data to Sitefinity Insight. Contact interactions are represented by events. When an event is triggered on a Sitefinity CMS site, the Sitefinity Insight Connector extracts the relevant data out of the event and sends the data to Sitefinity Insight as an interaction point.

NOTE: You can turn off event tracking from Sitefinity CMS Advanced settings.

Following is a comprehensive list of the interactions that the Insight connector tracks out-of-the-box:

• Track and collect data from Sitefinity CMS
• Track data client-side

Whether you are tracking a Sitefinity CMS or a non-Sitefinity CMS site, you have the flexibility to track custom data generated by your site, for example, tracking of custom widgets.

You can do this with the help of the Insight SDKs:

• Capture client-side behavior with JavaScript SDK
• Capture server-side data with .NET SDK

Track custom events with the Sitefinity Insight Connector

When tracking Sitefinity CMS sites, you can track custom events by creating new event handlers or overriding existing ones. For example, on a Sitefinity CMS site, you may want to:

• Generate custom interactions with a specific predicate or object, for example, clicking on an anchor on a page.
• Extend the reported subject and object metadata, for example, include specific form fields as subject metadata to enrich contact profiles.
• Generate interactions for custom widgets, for example, Feather Card widget that displays different variations of the page to specific contact segments

For more information about tracking Sitefinity CMS custom events, see Extend the tracking capabilities of the connector.

Track form submissions with Sitefinity Insight Connector

By default, Sitefinity Insight tracks forms submission on your Sitefinity CMS sites. However, you can extend the default functionality to track specific form fields with details; and populate and enrich contact profiles in Sitefinity Insight with these details.

The following articles describe how to track form submissions in the different technology stacks:

• Track and send form data to DEC
• Track a custom MVC Form widget

As a result, once an unknown contact submits the form, the interaction data is sent to Insight as subject metadata with key-value pairs of the tracked fields. The values the contact enters are populated in their Insight contact profile. For example, Interests, as additional metadata, is displayed in the Other data collected for this contact section. You can configure what contact to display and where. For more information, see Configure contact properties.

Leverage the JavaScript SDK for client-side tracking

When customizing client-side tracking for both Sitefinity CMS and non-Sitefinity CMS applications, you use the JavaScript SDK. The SDK provides an API that enables you to access the Insight API data collection endpoints. The most common example of a tracked client-side interaction is Visit. The JavaScript SDK supports out-of-the-box handling for tracking visits. To enable tracking of page visits, set the trackPageVisits parameter set to true. With the trackPageVisits parameter, you can also define the predicate, object, and object metadata to be used when tracking visits.

NOTE: Tracking page visits is enabled by default for Sitefinity CMS sites.

For more information, see Capture client-side behavior with JavaScript SDK.

In some cases, data is spread across different systems or sites and you need a way to integrate this data coming from different data sources. This enables marketing professionals to get reports and information for exactly what they need.

For example, for the specific needs of acquiring comprehensive data and reports about contacts on your site, your data center may import data from both Sitefinity CMS and Salesforce. Out-of-the-box, Sitefinity CMS provides you with data tracking of the contacts’ behavior on your site, sending the collected data to the dedicated data center. In addition, Insight synchronizes basic information about contacts with Salesforce. As a result, all acquired data for contacts is centralized, unified, and set in the dedicated data center for further analysis and reporting.

You may also integrate data (interactions and subject metadata) by uploading CSV files:

• Import data from a CSV file
• Data integration