This article is a recap of “Growth Decoded” a show that investigates the relationship between the customer experience and business growth — one topic at a time. Register here and conquer the customer experience!

What is Site Tracking?

Site Tracking is a capability that connects your marketing and sales actions to the activity your contacts take across your website. It lets you “listen” and then “respond” in real-time as contacts visit your site and view specific categories and pages.

How to think about Site Tracking:

Picture that you’re in a conversation with someone. When they speak, you listen. You hear what they’re saying, you internalize it, you categorize it, and you file away the information in your brain in their “file” — you remember it.

Let’s say you’re talking to your friend on the phone. They’re telling you all about how much they love this new band.

Then, a few weeks later, you’re scrolling through social media and you see a post about a pre-sale for an intimate concert event that the band is performing at, so you hit the share button, copy the link, and text it to your friend.

Or maybe you call them.

It doesn’t matter what your preferred method of notification is — the point is that you tell them right away.

Then what happens?

They’re:

  • Excited
  • Impressed you remembered
  • Grateful that you told them when they could still buy tickets before they sold out

What does this have to do with Site Tracking?

Think of Site Tracking like your website’s ears — you’re “listening” to the actions and behaviors that your contacts are taking across your site.

In the example we just ran through, you listened to your friend talk about their new favorite music artist. Then, you “tagged” your friend with this new musical artist in your brain.

In other words, you “remembered” that.

This is similar to the backend of Site Tracking, the automation or operations piece, it’s the “comprehension” part of it.

Site Tracking helps you:

  • “Listen” to your contact’s actions
  • Record them
  • Categorize them based on their interest areas, frequency, and more (segmentation)
  • Use them in your future conversations (personalization)

You can use Site Tracking data to add a contact to a list, tag them, or simply note their interest with a custom field in their contact profile.

THEN — in the example, you took action.

You saw the upcoming concert event, and that triggered an action for you to send them a message about the thing you already know they’re interested in.

How do you know?

Because they told you.

This is what Site Tracking let’s you do — send the right messages to the right people at the right time.

Now, you might be wondering:

How is Site Tracking different from any other analytics solution?

Analytics tools, like Google Analytics, give you stats about your website activity. They give you aggregated data that’s meant to help you see trends and find issues with your website.

Site Tracking gives you insight into what individual contacts are doing on your site.

Beyond that (and maybe most importantly) Site Tracking lets you create personalized experiences for each of your contacts as they interact with your website.

And not just create them — but automatethem.

Alright, sounds good right?

Of course it does. But:

  • What does all this look like in practice?
  • Does Site Tracking actually work like this?
  • What other problems can you solve with it?
  • Are there examples of more use cases?
  • How do you actually set it up in ActiveCampaign?

On our recent episode of Growth Decoded, we covered all this and more. We spoke with Sven Braam, Founder & CEO of Sneleentaxi, a company in the Netherlands that uses a “reverse auction” system to connect travelers and taxi companies.

Sven and Sneleentaxi used Site Tracking and ActiveCampaign to:

  • Raise €500k in a crowdfunding campaign
  • Better inform their sales team about individual contacts
  • Evaluate potential partners
  • See which contacts had a negative experience
  • Improve the customer experience for riders and taxi companies

Here’s what we learned:

Site Tracking is a powerful tool for you to use to better listen to and understand your individual contacts.

  1. Who are they? — The specific people who are engaged, these contacts are much more likely to be the contacts that will become customers
  2. What are they interested in? — If you know what people are interested in, you always know what to talk to them about
  3. How interested are they? — Are they just looking around, or are they ready to take action right now?

This information lets you reach out at the right time about the right thing.

The customer experience ultimately comes down to 2 things.

  1. How well do you know your customer?
  2. How well are you able to set, meet, or exceed their expectations?

Site tracking tells you what your customers are interested in, what resonates with them. This information lets you meet their expectations on what and when they want to hear from you.

This information is yours — it’s happening on your website and pages! It’s not information coming from a third-party source, but rather information that you can use regardless of what happens on the social media platforms, or how the Google Algorithm changes.

Your customers are talking to you — not always with words or messages or comments, but with their actions.

Site tracking is your ears, your digital listening system.

What are your customers saying?

This article is a recap of “Growth Decoded” a show that investigates the relationship between the customer experience and business growth — one topic at a time. Register here and conquer the customer experience!