Improving Tracking Fidelity

Out of the box, SegMetrics is configured to track visitors and leads as they travel through your marketing funnels. However, there are a number of edge cases that can keep SegMetrics from connecting visitors and leads together. This article explains how to increase the number of touch points that you can track with SegMetrics.

How SegMetrics Tracks Web Visitors

First, it's important to explain how SegMetrics tracks visitors, and how it connects that information back to contacts in your CRM.

SegMetrics Tracking Strategy

SegMetrics uses the following tracking strategy:

Unique ID Assignment: Any visitor who comes to your site is assigned a Unique ID. This is saved in a cookie for 1 year.
Visit Recording: Any page visit that has a UTM value, email address, ad_id or Contact id in the query string is sent to SegMetrics with that visitor's Unique ID.
Visit Storage: At this point, this "visit" is not connected to a lead in your CRM -- and we'll keep these visits for 90 days until we can identify the Contact in the next step.
Contact Identification: If at any point a visitor has an email address or Contact id in the query string, we make an "Identify" call, where we connect that visitor's Unique ID with that contact in your CRM. Multiple Unique IDs can be connected to a single Contact in your CRM, which means that you can track a single person over all their devices.
Form-Based Identification: Additionally, if the visitor enters their email address into any form, we send an Identify call to SegMetrics that connects the visitor's Unique ID with that email address.

Key Tracking Requirements

Based on the above, there are two things that are important when tracking your leads:

Make sure that your email and ad links have UTM values
Include the Contact Id in your email links to connect users over all their devices

Three Ways to Increase Tracking Fidelity

Here are four easy things you can do to significantly increase the percentage of contacts you're able to correctly identify.

1) Improve Identification Rate for New Visitors

This is probably the most common issue -- the identify pixel doesn't fire when someone enters their email address on a page, thus preventing them from connecting their Contact entry with their browser history.

This is most common when you have an iframe opt in. Basically when your opt-in form is a third party software thats not apart of your website software. In these cases, the tracking pixel needs to be applied directly to the software thats operating the opt-in form.

Second iframe solution: Pass Contact Information to Thank You Page

Some forms do not allow a tracking pixel on them. When this occurs the only way around it is to send contact info to a thank you page where the tracking pixel does exist. \ Since we identify visitors when they enter their email address AND when we see an email address or Contact Id in the URL string, the most surefire way to confirm that visitors are getting identified is to click "Pass contact's information to the Thank You Page" in your forms.

This will make sure that SegMetrics is able to identify your visitors, even if they have connectivity issues or ad blockers installed.

2) Make Sure Your UTM Values are Configured Correctly

Another common issue we see with tracked links is that the UTM values are not configured correctly. We recommend using a tool like Google's Campaign URL Builder to make sure that your UTM values are configured correctly.

Common UTM Configuration Errors

The biggest issue we see with UTM values is forgetting the & or = in each UTM value.

UTM values MUST come after a question mark, and be connected with ampersands.

Good UTM Examples:

https://example.com/?utm_campaign=awesome&utm_source=cpc

Bad UTM Examples:

https://example.com/?utm_campaign=awesomeutm_source=cpc
https://example.com/?utm_campaignawesome&utm_sourcecpc
https://example.com/utm_campaign=awesome&utm_source=cpc

4) Add the Contact Id (and UTM Values) to Your Email Links

The modern user has an average of 3 devices that they access the web with, and tracking users through those devices is a challenge, especially if some devices (like their smartphone) are rarely used for opt-ins, but still consume content from emails.

To make sure that you're able to track through all devices, we recommend adding the contact Id to the query string of your email links. This allows SegMetrics to connect the visitor's Unique Id with their contact record in your CRM.

CRM-Specific Contact ID Parameters

Depending on your CRM Integration, you'll want to use either the seg_cid (contact id) or email values to track users:

Keap: http://example.com/?seg_cid=~Contact.Id~
ActiveCampaign: http://example.com/?seg_cid=%SUBSCRIBERID%
Ontraport: https://example.com/?seg_cid=[Id]
Drip: (done automatically! No need for a setting)
HubSpot: http://example.com/?seg_cid={{contact.hs_object_id}}
ConvertKit: http://example.com/?seg_cid={{subscriber.id}}
MailChimp: http://example.com/?seg_cid=*|UNIQID|*
Klaviyo: http://example.com/?seg_cid={{klaviyo_profile_id}}

Special Note for Klaviyo Users

Klaviyo provides the settings to automatically include utm parameters to the links in Klaviyo emails.

Please see our Klaviyo integration documentation for more information.

Adding Additional UTM Values

If you want to go a little more advanced, you can also track your email clicks by adding in UTM values to those links, together with the contact Id. This allows you to see what emails people are clicking, and even determine what the last email people clicked before they purchased was.

Recommended email UTM format:

https://example.com/?utm_source=broadcast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign-name&utm_content=2019-01-19&seg_cid=~Contact.Id~

Note that we're including our source (broadcast), the medium (email), the campaign (what we're promoting) and the date of the email, as well as the Contact Id for identification.

Creating an Identify Call

You will only need this section to use the identify command if the marketing pages you are using are preventing SegMetrics from automatically identifying the user.

In most cases SegMetrics will automatically identify a contact when they enter their email address on your optin forms, or when they follow a link from an email.

SegMetrics uses the following tracking strategy:

The identify command lets you tie a contact in your email marketing platform to their actions on the website. It includes an email address, and automatically connects to the current session.

Example identify request

_segq.push(["identify", "john@example.com"]);

In some cases you may want to manually identify a contact when you don't have access to the JavaScript API, either through a webhook or backend system like Zapier.

In that case, you can make a standard HTTP request with the same information to connect a Session UID to a contact.

The Session UID is always available in _segs.data.uid

Tracking Without the JavaScript API

Manually Identifying a User

curl -X GET -G https://track.segmetrics.io/identify     
     -d account_id=YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID
     -d seg_uid=SESSION_UID
     -d email=john@example.com

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Why is my tracking pixel not identifying visitors on mobile devices?

A. This is most common on older mobile devices with slow cell connections, where users enter their email and immediately tap "Submit" before the pixel fires. Enable "Pass contact's information to the Thank You Page" in your forms to ensure identification even with connectivity issues.

Q. What's the most important thing I can do to improve tracking?

A. Make sure you're using the latest version of the SegMetrics pixel (seg.js) and enable contact information passing to thank you pages. These two changes will have the biggest impact on your tracking accuracy.

Q. How do I know if my UTM parameters are set up correctly?

A. Use Google's Campaign URL Builder tool to generate your UTM links. The most common error is missing ampersands (&) or equals signs (=) in the parameters. UTM values must come after a question mark and be connected with ampersands.

Q. Can I track the same person across multiple devices?

A. Yes! By including the Contact ID in your email links using the seg_cid parameter, SegMetrics can connect the same person across all their devices. Each device gets a unique ID, but multiple unique IDs can be connected to a single contact record.

Q. Do I need to update my tracking pixel regularly?

A. No, once you upgrade to the new pixel (seg.js), you won't need to update the code again. SegMetrics only requires updates between major versions to protect backwards compatibility.