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About ActiveCampaign Site Tracking
So I use ActiveCampaign for my own businesses and I love how powerful Site Tracking is.
If you’re using ActiveCampaign and you’re not aware, Site Tracking with ActiveCampaign allows you to trigger automated sales and marketing processes based on a contact’s activity on your website.
If you’re still considering ActiveCampaign Site Tracking is just one of the many features available, you can learn more and get a free trial by visiting the ActiveCampaign website.
This is how Site Tracking works: If a contact is already identified by ActiveCampaign and they come back to your website to view your pricing page you could set up a trigger to send a personal email to offer assistance, automatically. This is just one of many things you could do with Site Tracking, the rest is up to your imagination.
Identifying Contacts with Site Tracking
The problem that I struggled with regarding Site Tracking was the first step, actually identifying a contact.
If ActiveCampaign hasn’t been able to identify the contact these triggers based on site activity aren’t available
According to the ActiveCampaign website there are 3 methods to identify a contact with site tracking, link can be found here.
1st Method: Identify contacts using an ActiveCampaign form
This is the recommended method from ActiveCampaign, the contact submits the form and their activity is tracked straight away.
However putting it nicely the ActiveCampaign forms don’t look the best.
When I design a website page or landing page and install the ActiveCampaign form it sticks out like a sore thumb.
So I opted against using this method.
2nd Method: Identify contacts in by clicks in an ActiveCampaign automation or campaign email
This is the method that I used until recently.
It allowed me to create forms using my chosen form plugin that kept the styling on my website and landing pages consistent.
The challenge that I faced was having to wait for contacts to click on links before they can be identified.
This was not ideal because straight away I would lose a decent % of people who may not click the links.
Enter the 3rd method.
3rd Method: By passing the contact’s email address into the site tracking javascript code
This is a more complicated method but by executing it has allowed me to achieve both objectives I was looking for.
I’m able to style my website forms the way I want it and I can identify contacts for Site Tracking from the moment they fill out a form on my website.
This is how we did it:
Setting Up ActiveCampaign Site Tracking with Google Tag Manager
The first step if you haven’t already is to install Google Tag Manager to your website.
If you haven’t done so already you can check this blog on how to install it on your website.
1. Install ActiveCampaign Site Tracking
The first step is to install the ActiveCampaign Site Tracking code into Google Tag Manager as if you haven’t done so already.
First go into ActiveCampaign and get your Site Tracking code to install.
You can find the instructions to find and generate your Site Tracking code here
Click New in the top right.
Name your tag
Add a tag configuration by clicking the first white rectangle with the grey circle with the tag icon.
A side panel will pop-out and you want to select “Custom HTML”.
Paste the Site Tracking code you got from ActiveCampaign.
Next, you want to set up the trigger.
I normally select the trigger “All Pages” to track visits on all pages, however, if there are pages you don’t want to track then you will need to create an additional trigger and add it as an exclusion.
Click “Save” to add your tag.
2. Adding GTM Variables
This is where it might get a bit complicated.
We need to install 3 variables, these are information that we want Google Tag Manager to track and feed back to ActiveCampaign. These have been added in the User Defined Variables at the bottom of the screenshot.
- eventAction
- RegEx Table – emailField
- URL – ajax – email
I’ll share screenshots of how we set up each variable.
1. eventAction
2. RegEx Table – emailField
3. URL – ajax – email
3. Adding GTM Trigger
Add the Google Tag Manager trigger. This monitors for any form submissions that contain an email.
Configuration below:
4. Adding GTM Tags
Moving up the Google Tag Manager menu on the left, now we need to install some tags.
There are two tags that need to be installed to make this work.
- cHTML – AC – Identify
- cHTML – AJAX Listener
Here is the configuration:
1. cHTML – AC – Identify
The piece of code you need to add into the HTML section:
See the set up below:
In the triggering section select trigger event you created in Step 3.
2. cHTML – AJAX Listener
The second tag to install, we used the below code:
EDIT: The code keeps failing so here it is in a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d5-jHrfpptyagiKFi6XwmzDrrQ59PyEyHwb_PeZ8lnk/edit
Feel free to let me know how it goes!
That’s it!
Once all tags are installed make sure to Submit changes and publish.
This is what you should see:
The form plugin I’m using is called Bloom from Elegant Themes, the form directly integrates with ActiveCampaign, the instructions are specifically geared to Bloom as my website is built on a theme called Divi made my same company, Elegant Themes.
This method will still work for other popular form plugins like Thrive Leads or Gravity Forms however some of the parameters entered into Google Tag Manager may need to be changed. You may also need to engage a developer to make the necessary changes.
The point of this blog was to illustrate that it is definitely possible to activate Site Tracking instantly without needing to use the default ActiveCampaign forms.
If you would like our help in implementing this for your business, feel free reach out for a free consultation.