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Section 19 Action Tracking

Section 19 Action Tracking
Action Tracking is a cookie-based method to track actions and page visits that recipients perform after they have read your email message and followed the links to the target website.
For this to work properly, you need to embed pre-defined “action tags” into the HTML code of your web pages. Whenever a recipient visits one of these pages using a link from your email message, then the corresponding action tracking event is registered by LISTSERV Maestro.
19.1 Activating
Important: Before you can use this feature in the User Interface, the administrator needs to enable it for you.
To activate Action Tracking in the User Interface, click on the Report menu and then select Recipient Action Tracking. The Recipient Action Screen opens. Check the Activate Recipient Action Tracking box, and then use the Cookie Lifetime drop-down menu to define the cookie’s lifetime. The Cookie Lifetime determines how long the recipient’s browser will remember that the recipient viewed/clicked on the tracked email. The cookie’s lifetime can be defined for up to 30 days. If a marked page is visited at any time while the cookie is still valid, then this visit will be counted as an event even if the page is not revisited by an email link.
Tip: Cookies can be disabled by the recipient so your tracking results will never be 100% accurate; however, this feature can be extremely useful when analyzing trends.
19.2 Adding Action Tags
Next, you’ll need to define the action tags that will be used to track your recipient’s actions. To do so, click on the Add Action Tag link, enter the name of the action tag, and then click [OK]. Repeat this process until you are finished adding your actions tags. Once you are finished, all action tags will be listed in the Action Tags section.
Figure 19-1 The Recipient Action Tracking Screen
To rename or delete the action tag, simply click on the corresponding Rename or Delete link.
19.3 Adding Action Tracking Code to Your Web Pages
Once you’ve added your action tags, click on the Show Tag Code link for each tag to get the code that needs to be inserted into the HTML code for all web pages that you want to mark with action tags.
Figure 19-2 Action Tag Code
Once these tags are setup on your web pages, then any actions performed by your recipients that relate to these tags will be tracked by LISTSERV Maestro and can be viewed in your reports. In addition, when creating a target group based on a hosted recipient list or dataset, a job based condition node can now be based on action tracking.
Figure 19-3 Action Tracking Data on a Report
For more information on using action tracking events in reports, please see Section 12.5 Completed Job Reports and Section 13.1 Creating Reports (specifically Section 13.1.2 Adding a Data Source.)
19.4 Action Tracking Example
Let’s say that you have an online catalog that sells various products. In addition, online shoppers can subscribe to your site to receive emails advertising special sales and promotions.
For an upcoming holiday sale, you send out an advertisement mailing that contains tracked links to your product pages.
In addition to this link, you’ve also applied action tags to specific pages on your site, such as the pages for your sales and your Order Confirmation page.
These links and action tags will let you know when a subscriber visits your site, visits specific product pages, and when they purchase products. This will help you keep track of how successful your promotions are and what most interests your subscribers.