Event data tracking with Engage

The Engage tracker is a comprehensive tool to capture user event data. It tracks and captures most e-commerce related events out of the box for the major e-commerce platforms. Currently the following platforms are supported out of the box:

• Shopify
• Woocommerce
• Prestashop
• Magento 2
• AbiCart
• Wikinggruppen

However, tracking can be setup on any website or e-commerce site using a simple JavaScript. The events captured on each platform may vary a bit but generally the following are included:

• page view
• product view
• product seen
• added to cart
• removed from cart
• cart viewed
• started checkout
• completed purchase
• user identified

However, any event can be captured using the zlt.track() call. Read more about setting up tracking here.

Track once

One of the most useful and time saving features of the engage tracker is the ability to integrate other pixels as destinations. Most commonly, users integrate google analytics and Facebook to avoid writing additional code to track the same events for another tool, or in order to communicate with server-side APIs. Capture the data once, and use it where you see fit.

Tracking data once also means greater control of your data and better quality of your data. Every application using your data will use the same data, captured in one way and conforming to one standard. Which eliminates the risk of getting different results in different tools due to poor data quality.

Client side tracking

Using the zlt.track() code snippet you may capture any event on your website using javascript. Either by tracking custom events or by adding additional information to one of the standard events. Any event can be extended with any key-value pair of information.

Client side tracking is built with low latency and high performance in mind. Events are sent asynchroniously to avoid impact of page load speed and are seemlessly queued in case of network issues. The tracker automatically track page views without any added code snippet, and any other events can be added as per the example above.

The client side tracker is designed with privacy in mind. You can setup “no tracking” rules using consent cookies and granularly define what to track and what not to track. You may for example define destinations and events to exclude when no consent is given to track and use the required event data for that destination.

Server side tracking

The server side tracking is built similar to the client side tracking in terms of format, the main difference is of course that events are sent to an API endpoint instead of captured via the client. As with the client side tracker you may track any event and send it to Engage, or you can use one of the pre-defined events. In general, the main advantage of using pre-defined events is that the data is used in out of the box analytics within Engage. But if you’re capturing to store and use in third party applications, you may track any event using any event format.

Hybrid tracking

You may combine client side tracking and server side tracking to capture all data generated by your users. This is common when you’re tracking events in both websites and applications. It should however be noted that de-duplication if both methods are used on the same source is not supported out of the box in Engage.

SPA tracking

As one of few tracking solutions on the market, we pride ourselves over the fact that we support SPA (Single Page Application) platforms in various ways. If you define your own tracking you can simply call the zlt.track() from your components or templates. But we also support addon tracking with no changes made to source code when required.

Storing the collected data

When you capture your data using Engage we automatically organize, clean and store your data for you. We have a general 2 years data retention policy, sensitive data is encrypted upon ingestion and you may at any point push your data to any of our supported locations. It is important to us that the data is accessible and useable to you. Whenever you need it. Below is a list of currently supported data warehouse destinations where you may push your data.

• Google BigQuery
• Google Cloud Storage
• Snowflake
• Azure Analytics
• AWS Redshift
• AWS S3

In addition to above destinations, we are open to help out with custom destinations if required. Just drop us a note and we’ll work out something.

Using the collected data

There is of course no point in collecting this data unless you put it to use. The use cases of granular event data is almost endless but we’re going to highlight a few here to give you an idea of what you can achieve with the data.

Abandoned cart remarketing

Abandoned carts are still one of the most common ways to miss out on sales and revenue. The customer added something to cart, but left without ever checking out. It indicates an interest of the items added to cart but something caused the visitor to abort the purchase.

There can be many reasons for this behaviour and to many of which there is nothing to do to salvage the purchase. But in the cases where they simply postponed the purchase or was distracted by something else, abandoned carts can be converted using remarketing. The main benefit is that you already know that the visitor has or had a purchase intention and what items the visitor was interested in.

Proper sales attribution

With first party data collected you may determine from where your sales originated. No more double counting from various marketing channels. Engage offers three main models for sales attribution.

1. First touch attribution - See where the customer first came in contact with your store or business
2. Last touch attribution - Which ad or touch point triggered the customer to convert?
3. Multi touch attribution model - Score all touch point throughout a customers journey from visitor to customer and weight the importance of each one for each purchase event. Get an overall understanding of your customer acquisition journey.

Bounce rate reporting

Find sources, landing pages or campaigns from where users bounce. This is useful to understand what sources are contributing to valuable or less valuable traffic to your store. And to understand what landing pages or campaigns works better than others. We see many stores driving paid traffic that essentially just bounce upon arrival. This means the merchant is wasting money on poor quality traffic.

Funnel analysis

What is your sales funnel? What percentage of visitors pass each step? Are there steps in your funnel that can be optimized?

Funnel analysis is useful to improve the customer experience on your site, and it is also useful for you to understand how many visitors you need to enter the funnel in order to get a sale at the end of it.

Fuel other applications

Many applications utilize event data today. Using your data in third party applications open up even more use cases to take advantage of.

Conclusion

The Engage tracking system is comprehensive and capable. It allow merchants to focus on core areas of their business while still gathering the data required to compete on the market today. Use it to bring necessary insights and functionality to further improve your store performance. Take control over your data and prepare for a world dominated by first party granular data. We will keep develop our tracking capability and add new features and use cases as we go.

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Tracker remarketing