Does ActiveCampaign Site Track Retroactively?

by Dave | activecampaign

Active Campaign site tracking retroactively.

In this video, we’re going to cover what happens when you have tracking installed and a visitor isn’t already on your list, does Active Campaign create a contact? And secondly, what happens when someone joins your list has previously visited your site to site tracking work retroactively? To accomplish that, we’re going to basically do some experiments, so let’s dive right in.

To start with, we want to make sure Active Campaign is installed on your site. In this case, I have it on here. And we want to force the email address into the tracking manually to see if it’s going to work retroactively. So let me just show you the source code as it is right now.

And here’s the Active Campaign tracking, I’m going to force my email address in here and I want to make sure that email addresses not in active campaign already. So let me go look inside there. So there’s no one with that email address in there. So I’m going to hard code that in right now as we speak. And now I’m going to go ahead and just refresh this page to show you that my email address is now in.

So I’m gonna refresh the page, I’m going to view the source code to see that it’s still in there. And there it is. So now, do I have that user in there, refresh this page, look for that same user now. So that answers that Active Campaign does not create a user if they’re not in there, but they’re being tracked.

So I’m going to keep track of the time because the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to add myself to Active Campaign and then visit the site again. So 7:46 right now, I’m going to pause for about four, five minutes, come back, create the user and visit the site. And I want to know if my 7:45 or 7:46 visit was registered or not.

Okay, so it’s been a few minutes. Now, what I want to do is check just a sanity check to make sure I’m not in here still. And this time, I’m going to add myself in as a contact.

So let’s go see if I have any tracking. So currently, no tracking. And again, I’m going to wait five more minutes just to make sure it doesn’t get added retroactively then I’ll go visit the site. So as it stands right now, there is no tracking email, I’ve added myself I previously visited the site.

So we’ll wait till 7:55.

Okay, so we’re back just for fun. One more time. Let’s see if tracking is kicked in. So nothing there. Now, I’m gonna go visit the page and it has my email address embedded, so this time tracking should kick into. Let’s go ahead and refresh that page.

I’m going to refresh this. And of course, there might be a little bit of lag. There we go. So it picked up me and actually my previous and I went into some automation. So what it looks like is it only starts tracking even if you already have their email address once they’ve been added to the system. Now, just to be absolutely sure, I’m going to wait five more minutes and see if it’s going to put in some time retroactively. So I’ll be back at eight o’clock. So that’s for minutes.

Okay, let’s start a little bit early and not wait till eight. So first thing is I’m going to go back here and just refresh just to make sure no new activities have been recorded or any old activity.

So yes, four minutes ago, I visited the site and it did not capture previous visits. And then just to be sure, let’s visit or refresh this page one more time. An I’m gonna refresh this.

So there, now we know Active Campaign site tracking retroactively does not occur, nor does the user get created even if you’re tracking that person prior to them being added to Active Campaign.