Manage visitor data
Knowing how your visitors navigate and what content they consume through your digital content brings you invaluable insights for defining and optimizing your customer journeys.
Xperience’s Contact activity tracking feature allows you to track and analyze how contacts engage with your website, including browsing patterns, content consumption, form submissions, downloads, and other activities.
Xperience tracks contacts based on a cookie. Once the contact agrees with the tracking, Xperience will always try to match and log all activities done by a specific contact, even when the contact performs the activity on a different device (such as visiting the website on their desktop and mobile phone).
Depending on a cookie that represents a current contact, Xperience doesn’t require any further unique identification, such as a contact’s email. As a result, the system can log the activities of “anonymous” visitors and identify them later, for example, when they share their email addresses with you via a form.
You can view the collected contact data in the Contact management application. Xperience displays all activities on the website in the Activities section. When opening individual contacts, you can see you can see their activities.
With the Xperience Cross-site tracking feature, you generate an Xperience tracking script, insert it into your third-party website - and you can start collecting your website’s visitor data, even on websites that haven’t been built with Xperience. Creating an overall picture of your customer’s interactions in one system opens new opportunities to personalize your marketing experience.
Find out more about Contact management and tracking contact activities in the documentation.
Data protection and GDPR
The Data protection functionality helps you stay within the legal boundaries of different data protection regulations in marketing-related actions. Developers can prepare data protection on your website in different ways. Usually, Xperience will use the contact’s email address as a unique identifier.
Find out more about data protection and cookies in the documentation.
Exercise - Tracking a contact in Xperience
This exercise will give you hands-on experience with the contact tracking feature. You’ll impersonate a website visitor using an incognito window, private window, or another browser and see how Xperience by Kentico collects visitor data in the Contact management application.
Task:
Open the Contact management application in the Xperience administration in one window and your live site in a second, incognito window. (You can copy the whole application URL, open a new incognito window tab, paste in the URL, and remove everything starting from /admin/ to the end. Your adjusted URL with only a website homepage URL will look like this, for example, https://us-03.kenticolab.com/Hosted_Kbank_12345 .)
In the incognito window, consent to tracking using the Accept all button in the consent banner.
Switch to the Xperience administration and go to the Contacts tab to refresh your contact list in the Contact management application.
Select the Created column header in the contacts list to reorder your existing contacts from newest to oldest.
Select the newest contact. This new contact’s name is Anonymous - (timestamp); for example, Anonymous - 2022-08-23 04:45:06.775.
Use the Activities button below the contact’s Overview to see the list of activities the contact has performed on the website.
Perform some activities in the incognito window for your contact. Here are some examples: Visit the News listing page, the Want more space? article, and Loans page, and submit a form on the Contact page.
- Switch between the live site in the incognito window and the administration while performing these activities. See the Overview in your contact’s profile. Then, go back to the Activities tab to view the collected data. Watch how Xperience tracks activities in real time.
When you finish browsing your website in the incognito window, switch to the contact’s Overview tab. If you have submitted the form on the Contact page, your demo contact will no longer be anonymous.
Keep your contact database up-to-date
A healthy contact database is the foundation of effective marketing. As your site brings in more visitors, your database will grow. Without regular maintenance, it can lead to slower loading, lower performance, and higher storage costs. Keeping your database clean helps your team work more efficiently and save money.
A simple way to keep your database healthy is to ask developers to enable automatic deletion for contacts who haven’t been active for a set period (the minimum is 7 days). This is helpful if you have many inactive or one-time visitors who probably won’t convert. The cleanup happens overnight, so your site and your team’s work won’t be interrupted.
Things to consider before deleting inactive contacts
Deleting a contact is permanent. When you remove a contact, all related data is deleted too, including activity history, consent agreements, journey conversions, and email records. Before you enable this, check with your team and legal advisors to be sure you won’t need the deleted data for compliance, audits, or ongoing digital marketing campaigns.
Adjust the default contact settings to fit your needs
Every business has unique needs, and a basic inactivity rule might not match your data retention requirements, especially if you work in different regions or handle important customer groups. If that’s the case, ask your developers to set up custom deletion rules, like region-specific retention times, exceptions for VIPs or active campaign contacts, and extra safeguards such as audit logs and pre-deletion reports. This way, you’ll have a faster, more reliable database your team can count on.
Find out more about deleting inactive contacts in the developer documentation
Next step
Continue learning about collecting visitor data.