What is web tracking and why is it useful?
There are many website visitor tracking tools out there, each serving its own use case.
Outfunnel's website visitor tracking feature shows you which leads are visiting your website, where they come from, and which pages they've been on. And naturally, we sync all of this data to your CRM.
This way you’ll know who is more interested in your products and services, what they’re interested in, whether they’re more likely to buy, and which channel converts best.
Web visitor tracking is also a key part of our lead scoring feature, allowing you to save time by focusing only on the highest-scoring leads.
How does it work?
Here's how Outfunnel's web tracking works:
Lead arrives on your website that has Outfunnel’s tracking script.
They are assigned an anonymous ID that is stored in the browser’s cookies without an expiration date. When the same lead arrives on another page on your website later, we then look up the anonymous ID and associate the visit with them.
A lead gets identified once they fill in a form on your website or click on a link in your marketing or sales email that leads to your website
You'll get access to their lead source, the country they are visiting from, the pages they have visited, and the session length. This information is visible in Outfunnel and is also synced to the person profile in your CRM
💡 Outfunnel also stores visits from the time the visitor was anonymous. For example:
Visitor timeline
Day 1: Lead clicks on a Google ad and arrives on your website. They browse around but don't submit a form (aka they are anonymous)
Day 31: Lead comes back to your website organically through Google and submits a form
Data you'll see
Outfunnel stores the initial lead source, referrer and landing page to a field in your CRM
An unique visit activity is created for both visits including the specific lead source information, time spent on the page, country of origin and visited pages
How to set up web tracking
Step 1. Add Outfunnel tracking code on your site.
Step 2. Identify your first web visitor from a form fill or email campaign
Outfunnel can identify a lead in any of the following ways:
Source | Examples |
Fill in any HTML form on your website | Mailchimp Forms, Gravity Forms, Webflow, Unbounce, Contact Form 7, Hubspot HTML forms, Wix forms, Elementor Forms, etc.
If your website is a single-page application, see here. |
Fill in a supported iframe form on your website | Option 1: Hubspot Forms, Jotform pasted as "source code", and a selection of other iframe forms work out of the box.
Option 2: Paperform, Typeform and a selection of other iframe forms that can redirect the visitor back to your website after completion and support appending ?of_tpem=[email address merge field] to the redirect URL so that the boxed bracket merge field gets replaced with the email address.
Reach out to support for help. |
Fill in a Calendly form | Calendly must be embedded on your website and authenticated in Outfunnel |
Click on emails sent from any marketing platform or sales enablement tool incl. Mailchimp, Pipedrive Campaigns, Hubspot, Lemlist etc. | See here for instructions on how to create tracking links |
Click on emails sent from Outfunnel | Emails sent from Outfunnel's campaign tool.
Note that the campaigns functionality is no longer available for new users. |
Pass visitor email from your data layer to Outfunnel programmatically by calling OutfunnelTracking.identifyVisitor() function | Example call: OutfunnelTracking.identifyVisitor("test@example.com")To test that the implementation is correct, head to your website, open the Cookies tab in your Developer tools, and search for “ofs” cookie. Once an identify call has been made, you should see the email appear in the “e” section of the cookie. |
Go ahead and submit a test form on your website or click on a tracked link in your email to identify your first lead.
Step 3: See the web visits of the identified leads
After a lead has been identified they appear in the Identified visitors feed within a minute. We’ll show you the time of the visit and the pages visited. If the web visit data does not show after a page refresh, please reach out to our support team.
💡 Outfunnel applies a 3-second delay to the start of web tracking and uses a combination of browser data points to determine whether the visit has been made by a bot or a human. This means that if you identify a lead from an email click, a web visit may not always be recorded to reduce clutter and only provide you with accurate data.
The more people click on your emails or fill in the form, the more people Outfunnel can identify, so we recommend adding the tracking links to all marketing and sales emails to increase the number of people Outfunnel can identify.
Step 4. Setup CRM workflows
Workflows allow you to sync website visits and contact source information to your CRM. Next to page views Outfunnel also records how the lead first landed on your website with the following parameters:
Lead source: Outfunnel auto-detects the source and medium of a lead. For example, if the user types your website directly to the browser's search bar the Lead source field will show source=direct; medium=direct.
We highly recommend using custom parameters for more accurate tracking. For example UTM parameters or Ad parameters (ie gclid, fbclid). This information gets extracted from the URL by the tracking code and stored to the visitor feed and your CRM.
Referrer: This is the webpage the lead visited before arriving on your website. For example google.com, facebook.com, or any other webpage. If the user typed your website address directly to the browser then no Referrer is present
Landing page: This is the very first webpage the lead visited on your website
💡 UTM parameters and Ad parameters are tags that marketers attach to links to track the performance of marketing efforts.
For example, if you are running Facebook ads you'd want to tag the links so you can later attribute a visit to the Facebook ad. You can do the same for guest blog articles, Linkedin posts, personal email footer, marketing campaigns, and so fort
Enriched profile in the CRM
Based on this information you can measure the effectiveness and ROI of your marketing campaigns and channels. See here for more info.
How to set it up
Navigate to the Web tracking workflows page
Enable the respective workflows.
Outfunnel will create the activity types and fields once the first data point is synced
💡 If you are using Salesforce, you need to add the fields to your lead/contact layout pages through Salesforce > Setup > Object Manager > Lead/Contact > Find the below fields and add them to the respective layouts.
Fields:
Lead source
Landing page
Referrer
Tracking multiple websites
Outfunnel also supports tracking multiple websites - simply add the snippet to as many other websites as you'd like. Once a visit occurs we'll show you in Outfunnel and CRM which domain they visited.
If you use subdomains then the lead only needs to be identified once. For example, if you have added the tracking code to example.com and app.example.com then we can track the same lead across both websites and sync the very first lead source information. This use case is great for SaaS companies that first direct their leads to the marketing website and the lead proceeds to create an account in the app.
Note that this does not work with separate domains. For example, www.firstdomain.com and www.seconddomain.com cannot be cross-identified.
Single page applications
To identify leads on single-page applications, or any application that does not use form submit, HTML attributes can be used. Outfunnel tracking script uses two attributes:
data-of-track="email" - marks the email input field
data-of-track="submit" - marks the save/signup/submit button
Add these attributes to the email <input> field and submit <button> element on your login/register page to identify leads from single-page applications.
Example:
<input data-of-track="email" type="email">
<button data-of-track="submit">submit</button>
Stay compliant with regulations like GDPR and CCPA
If you’re based in European Union or selling to people based in European Union, make sure your website’s Privacy Notice and/or Cookie notification covers consent to track people’s website visits. CCPA makes a similar requirement regarding residents of California.
We’ve provided further instructions in this article.
Tips, observations, and useful definitions
💡 5 min sync delay to CRM. In order to increase usefulness to salespeople, we post web visits and the lead source information to the CRM 5 minutes after the lead’s last activity on your website. This is what we call a web visit session.
For example, it’s possible to have an activity created in your CRM that covers a 40-minute session, a 5-minute session, or any other time period based on lead activity. If the lead then visits your website after 5 minutes of inactivity a new web visit session is created and the page views are synced under a new activity once another 5 minutes of inactivity has passed.
The visit appears under the Identified visitors feed almost immediately.
💡 Create workflows. We recommend using the CRM workflow automation feature to notify your sales rep once a visit occurs. Learn more.
💡 Outfunnel does not create contacts in your CRM from web tracking. We recommend using our connector, the form's native connector, or a 3rd party tool to create contacts in your CRM from form fills.
💡 What if a lead clears their cookies or uses a different browser? If an identified lead clears their cookies or visits your website from another browser/device, they will be assigned a new anonymous ID. If the new anonymous ID is identified again and the email matches the previously identified email then their profile and visits will be merged.
💡 Visitor is not identified. See here for common reasons why a visitor is not identified.