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Contacts represent website visitors and store marketing-related information about them. To learn more about contacts, see Working with contacts.
To track contacts on websites presented by a separate MVC application, you need to:
Default cookie level or consent requirements
The contact tracking functionality in Kentico EMS only works if the setting is set to or , or for visitors who give tracking consent and increase their cookie level. For more information, see .
Contact detail updates are batch processed and logged at an interval together with activities. To learn how to change the logging interval, see Configuring activity and contact update processing.
The system uses a browser cookie as persistent storage for the current contact. By default, the storage is empty. However, once you ask for the current contact, the system sets the contact's GUID (unique identifier) to every response cookie.
To get the current contact in the implementation of an MVC website, call the ContactManagementContext.GetCurrentContact method. The context class and method are available in the CMS.ContactManagement namespace (part of the API provided by the Kentico.Libraries NuGet package).
using CMS.ContactManagement;// Gets the current contact
ContactInfo currentContact = ContactManagementContext.GetCurrentContact();If there is no contact related to the currently processed request, the GetCurrentContact method automatically creates and returns a new anonymous contact by default. You can disable the automatic creation of new contacts by calling the method with a false bool parameter.
Tip: If you wish to use the dependency injection design pattern on your website, you can create a custom service to provide the required contact management functionality. Call the methods of the ContactManagementContext class within the service's implementation.
For effective tracking of contacts, you need each registered user to use the same contact for all their visits. To ensure that registered users correctly use a permanent contact:
Use the following steps to implement the required functionality on your MVC site:
Pass the user name of the signed in or registered user via the method's parameter (represented by the userName variable in the code example).
Call the method only after a successful sign-in or registration.
using CMS.ContactManagement;ContactManagementContext.UpdateUserLoginContact(userName);The UpdateUserLoginContact method performs the following functions:
In some cases, multiple contacts on your websites may actually represent a single real‑world person. Automatic merging allows you to get rid of duplicates by combining several contacts into a single object. The system automatically merges contacts that are associated with the same email address.