--- title: Configuring marketing automation related: - https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/marketing-automation.md --- > Agent instructions: > **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown. > > - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version. > - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt). > **Info:** **Enterprise license required** > > Features described on this page require the **Kentico Xperience Enterprise** license. Marketing automation helps you automate, optimize and analyze your website's marketing activities. Typical examples are automatic campaigns promoted by emails, or nurturing of website visitors and leads – represented by [contacts](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/contact-management/working-with-contacts.md) in Xperience. To be able to work with processes and steps in the **Marketing automation** application, you need to have the permissions for the [On-line marketing](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-on-line-marketing-permissions.md#marketing-automation) and [Contact management](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-on-line-marketing-permissions.md#contact-management) modules. ## Setting up marketing automation First, you need to enable on-line marketing functionality so that the system can track [contacts](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/contact-management/working-with-contacts.md) handled in the automation processes: 1. Open the **Settings** application. 2. Navigate to **On-line marketing**. 3. Select the **Enable on-line marketing** checkbox. 4. Click **Save**. 5. Enable [tracking of contacts](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-contacts/setting-up-contact-tracking.md) and [logging of activities](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-activities/enabling-activity-tracking.md) on the side of your MVC application. Your marketers can then [set up the required automation processes](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/marketing-automation/working-with-marketing-automation-processes.md). You can also use marketing automation to configure scenarios that utilize various other features in the system – for example send an automated reminder to customers who leave the website and still have products in their shopping cart: [ Send an automated reminder of an abandoned shopping cart](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-marketing-automation/walkthrough-sending-an-automated-reminder-of-an-abandoned-shopping-cart.md) Additionally, developers can extend and modify the marketing automation functionality: - [Develop custom marketing automation actions](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-marketing-automation/developing-custom-marketing-automation-actions.md) – create custom action steps, which users can then incorporate into automation processes. - [Handle marketing automation triggers](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/configuring-and-customizing-your-on-line-marketing-features/configuring-marketing-automation/handling-marketing-automation-triggers.md) – implement custom handlers to influence the processing of triggers in automation processes. > **Note:** **Where do marketing automation processes run?** > > Marketing automation processes are started and kept running by the Xperience administration application, not the MVC live site application (for more information, see [MVC development overview](https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/mvc-development-overview.md)). > > This means that you also need to ensure the Xperience application remains alive, even though it does not receive regular traffic from website visitors. For example, you can set the **Start Mode** advanced setting of the used application pool in IIS to _**AlwaysRunning**._ ## Tracking marketing automation in the Event log By default, the system logs an [event log](https://docs.kentico.com/13/developing-websites/troubleshooting-websites/working-with-the-system-event-log.md) entry whenever a contact moves to a different step in a marketing automation process. You can view the event log in the**Event log** application. > **Info:** **Disabling event logging for marketing automation** > > When running automation processes for very large numbers of contacts, logging of step transitions may lead to a cluttered event log or even website performance problems. > > Administrators with access to the web project's file system can disable the logging of these events by adding the following key to the _appSettings_ section of the _web.config_ file: > > ```html > > > > ```