Enabling campaign tracking

Enterprise license required

Features described on this page require the Kentico Xperience Enterprise license.

Marketers define campaigns and measure their results in the interface of the Xperience administration application. However, the content targeted by the campaign is served by the separate live site application (MVC 5 or Core), so developers need to take additional steps to ensure that the site logs page visit conversions for campaigns.

Registering campaign tracking

Perform the following steps to register campaign tracking functionality for your live site application:

Open your MVC project in Visual Studio.
Call the UseCampaignLogger method of the ApplicationBuilder instance.
- Enable the campaign logging feature at the start of your application’s life cycle, for example in the Application_Start method of your project’s Global.asax file.
  MVC projects created by the installer contain the ApplicationConfig class, whose RegisterFeatures method is called in the Application_Start method by default. You can use this class to encapsulate all of your ApplicationBuilder code (enabling and configuring of Xperience MVC features).
```
  using Kentico.Web.Mvc;
  using Kentico.CampaignLogging.Web.Mvc;

  ...

  protected void Application_Start()
  {
      ...

      // Gets the ApplicationBuilder instance
      // Allows you to enable and configure selected Xperience MVC integration features
      ApplicationBuilder builder = ApplicationBuilder.Current;

      // Enables the campaign logging feature
      builder.UseCampaignLogger();

      ...
  }


  
```
  The UseCampaignLogger method ensures that the application sends all actions through a campaign logger before they get to controllers.
Enable logging of all activity types for your application (both membership and page-related activities).

Open your live site project in Visual Studio.
Edit your application’s startup class (Startup.cs by default).

Enable the web analytics feature by calling the UseCampaignLogger method of the IFeaturesBuilder delegate passed to the IServiceCollection.AddKentico method within ConfigureServices.




 using Kentico.Web.Mvc;
 using Kentico.CampaignLogging.Web.Mvc;

 ...

 public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
 {
     ...
     // Enables and configures Xperience features
     services.AddKentico(features =>
     {
         // Enables the campaign logging feature
         features.UseCampaignLogger();
         ... 
     });

     ...
 }

Enable logging of all activity types for your application (both membership and page-related activities).

When a visitor arrives on the website through a campaign link with the required UTM parameters, the system now logs campaign page visits and other conversions.

Hashing of page visit activities

The system hashes the URLs of Page visit conversions/journey steps and activities to be able to put data for reports together as quickly as possible.

By default, the hash function removes the protocol and all query strings from the URL. The campaign then works regardless of the used protocol (for example, for both http and https). However, the default hash function does not work for sites where displaying of pages is performed via query strings or component identifiers (for example, if the URL of a page on your site looks like http://www.mysite.com/index.html?viewpage=123). More specifically, the noted address will be trimmed to www.mysite.com/index.html, and all pages trimmed to this “URL root” will be logged as conversions for one page. Therefore, we recommend using URLs without query string parameters.

If your site displays its content using query strings or uses any uncovered scenarios, and you want to use campaigns, you can customize the hash function to fulfill your needs. To customize the default hash function, see Customizing the page visit hash function for campaigns. On the referred page, there is also an example of a hash function that removes the culture code in the page URL so that the campaign works as expected on multilingual sites.

Improving performance

To improve the performance of report calculation, create a database index on the ActivityURLHash column in the OM_Activity database table. The index should be non-clustered and non-unique. See the Create Nonclustered Indexes article for more information.