ActiveCampaign their Site Tracking is a really handy feature to figure out what contacts are doing on your website 🕵
You can use it to tag people, but also to start automations.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you a bunch of cool possibilities 🙌
- What is Site Tracking in ActiveCampaign?
- How to install the site tracking script
- 3 cool possibilities with Site Tracking
Let’s dive in!
Video Tutorial
You can either watch the video tutorial, or scroll down to read the full tutorial below.
You can get a copy of all the automations I created in the video here.
What is Site Tracking in ActiveCampaign?
With site tracking, you can connect your email marketing with your website.
In other words, after adding the site tracking script to your website, ActiveCampaign is able to track which page’s contacts are visiting on your website.
And based on that, you can add tags & trigger automations 🔥
Imagine someone visiting a FAQ page, and a few minutes later they’ll get an email from you to ask if they need any help.
Or they read articles about a certain subject, and you’re able to tag their interests so you can send them more relevant emails later on.
It’s really easy to setup.
And it’s incredibly cool what you can do with it.
How to add the Site Tracking script to your website
This is really easy.
But first, we have to do some settings.
Tracking Settings
In ActiveCampaign, go to Settings » Tracking.
You’ll get a page that looks like this:
Enable site tracking.
And whitelist all your domains ánd sub-domains.
In my case, I’ll add “maxvancollenburg.com” & “playground.maxvancollenburg.com”.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to add www. here 🙂
And then you have to copy the tracking code.
Adding the script
So now, you have to go over to your website.
The implement depends a bit on how your website is built.
But you need to add the script to the <head> or <footer> of your website.
The following methods are for WordPress.
An easy plugin you can use is Insert Headers and Footers from WPBeginner.
After you’ve installed it you get a simple page like this where you can add the script:
But you can also add the script directly to your WordPress theme by going to Appearance » Theme Editor.
Note: if you use the theme editor, make sure you’re using a child theme. Otherwise, the script will disappear after you update the theme.
And the third method is Google Tag Manager, but that is slightly more advanced.
Go for whatever is easiest for you 🙃
And after you’ve added it, send some visitors to your website, and the yellow warning at the top of the tracking page should disappear if you’ve implemented it correctly.
3 cool possibilities with Site Tracking
Let’s go crazy!
There are so many possibilities with Site Tracking.
But in this guide, I want to talk about my three favorites 😄🙌
Templates: you can import the example automations that I’ll show you in a bit here.
Interest tagging 🏷️
Every person is different and has different interests.
So how cool would it be if you know exactly what someone is interested in?
Well, with site tracking that’s not too difficult.
We can check what kind of pages someone is visiting, and then apply tags based on that.
So go over to ActiveCampaign, and create a new automation.
We’re starting this automation from scratch.
Then you’ll be asked how you want to trigger the automation.
Click “Web page is visited”.
Select your page URL, and add a * after it.
The star will work as a wild card, which means it will trigger for ALL pages.
And don’t forget to set it to run multiple times.
So what happens now, is that every time a contact visits a page, the automation will start.
Then, we have to create something that checks which pages they visited & how often.
In my case, I want to tag a few different interests;
- ActiveCampaign
- ManyChat
- Automation
And usually, I use those words in the URL of the article.
(for example, this article is /active campaign-site-tracking)
So all we have to do is check with an if/else if someone visited a page that contains “activecampaign” at least two times.
With that, the automation looks like this now:
The people who follow the yes-path visited a page that contains activecampaign two or more times.
Those people, we want to give the tag [Interest] ActiveCampaign.
Then we go over to the next topic, ManyChat.
We simply repeat the process:
And another time for automation:
But that’s not it.
We don’t want people to exit the automation after they matched one interest.
We want to check if they’re interested in one of the other topics as well.
To do that, we’re going to insert some Go To’s:
You add them underneath the tag and drag them over to the next If/Else.
Easy, right?
Now you know exactly what your contacts are interested in.
And you can use that to send them more relevant emails.
People who are interested in apples get emails about apples 🍎
People who are interested in pears get emails about pears 🍐
Abandonment Cart 🛒
The next use case is about sending an email to people who álmost purchased your product.
This especially works well if you sell a few digital products.
(massive webshops probably need a different method)
What we’re basically going to do, we’re going to check who visited the checkout page but NOT the order confirmed page.
So, go ahead an create a new automation from scratch:
The trigger will be again “Web page is visited”.
After that, you add the URL of your checkout page & you trigger the automation multiple times.
To prevent that the automation starts again while someone is already in it, we segment the contacts that enter the automation:
And we add a 30-minutes wait, to give people some time to complete their purchase.
After the 30-minute wait, we check if the contact purchased the product.
To do that, we add an if/else to the automation.
We set the conditions to check if the contact has the purchase tag, which you could automatically add to ActiveCampaign with a smart cart platform like ThriveCart, or if they ever visited the order confirmation page.
And if they have the tag, or visited the page, we know they purchased the product so we end the automation:
If not, we send an email:
And after that, we add a 2-week delay & exit the automation.
We add the delay, to make sure people don’t get this email every time they visit the checkout page.
Because we only trigger the automation if the contact is not currently in it, it won’t trigger for two weeks.
Exit promotions automatically ❌
Ok, last example 🤓
This is a simple one.
Imagine you’re doing a 3-day promotion to your email list with multiple reminders.
Wouldn’t it be super annoying if someone purchased on the first day, but then still gets the reminders?
You need to make sure they exit the automation so they don’t keep getting emails.
To do that, we add a goal to the end of our promotion automation:
Name it “Purchased offer” and leave the rest as it is:
Then, click “click to add a goal” and you’ll get the goal editor:
There, we check if they have the purchased tag.
But also, if they visited the confirmation page 🔥
So now, everyone who purchased the offer before the deadline will automatically exit the automation when they visit the confirmation page.
Even if they order with a different email address, you will know 😎
Over to you
That’s it!
Now I would like to hear from you.
How are you going to use site tracking?
Or do you have any questions about it?
Whatever it is, let me know in the comments below.
