Collect data through the connector

Overview

Tracking within Sitefinity Insight is accomplished by collecting and sending information for customer interactions. Each customer interaction consists of the following three types of data (or a subset of them):

  • Send interactions that describe contacts' actions on the website.
  • Send additional data (metadata) related to the objects or subjects in the tracking scenarios.
    Sending of metadata may be as a part of the interaction or as a separate request.
  • Send subject mappings, that is, relate two subjects that the system has recognized as representing the same contact.

Send interactions

Sitefinity Insight connector uses the interaction data model to collect data. The sentence is the data unit that holds the information of what activity was completed on the website, by whom, and when. An interaction is comprised of the following:
  • Subject – the identifier of the visitor who performed the action.
  • Object – the entity which is the target of the executed action.
  • Predicate – the name of the action (the verb).
  • Additional data about the subject or the object. This data is optional and consists of key-value pairs.

Following is an example of an interaction sent by the connector to Sitefinity Insight when a contact visits a particular page:

Subject: User Id
Object: Page URL
Predicate: Has Visited
SubjectMetadata: FristName, Email
ObjectMetadata: PageTitle, IsPagePersonalized

Send metadata

As mentioned above, a separate metadata submission request may be of two kinds – subject and object. The model of the subject metadata request contains the subject identifier and a collection of key and value pairs, holding the data related to this subject. The model of the object metadata request contains the object identifier, the predicate on which the tracking occurred, and of course – the collection of key and value pairs holding the data related to the object.

SubjectMetadata: FirstName, Email
ObjectMetadata: PageTitle, IsPagePersonalized

Send contact mappings

Very often, when users first arrive on a website, their identity is unknown. To track contact interactions, the Sitefinity Insight connector maintains a tracking ID of the contact until the moment the connector recognizes the contact's identity. This most often happens when contacts log in to their accounts. At the moment of logging, a subject mapping is sent to Sitefinity Insight. Thus Sitefinity Insight knows that all records associated with this specific tracking ID are related to the actions of the ID of the contact logging in. From this point on, the connector uses the user ID for associating actions to this contact. Once the contact logs out, the connector gets back on using the tracking ID already related to this specific contact.

Content analysis data

When you use the Sitefinity Insight connector, you have an option to send additional data to feed advanced content analysis. This is a prerequisite to use the Content recommender feature. For more information, see Content recommender

This data consists of the following:

  • The entire HTML of the pages of your sites.
    The sites must be connected to a Sitefinity Insight data center.
  • All string, date/time, GUID metadata, and the content of the following static content types: News, Blog posts, Events, List items, Content blocks, and the fields of dynamic types.
  • All string, date/time, and GUID metadata of images, videos, and documents.

NOTE: Only publicly available fields are sent. If any of the listed items have permissions that make them not public, Sitefinity CMS does not send them to Sitefinity Insight. The same applies to fields of dynamic content types – only the public fields are sent.

NOTE: If you change the permissions after the data has already been sent to Sitefinity Insight and you want to make sure that newly protected data is no longer stored in Sitefinity Insight, you must sync the data to Sitefinity Insight after the change. To do this, disable and then re-enable the content tracking, as described in the procedure Connect to Sitefinity Insight » Configure content tracking.

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