Getting started with Trackers

With Sidetracker tracking starts by creating Trackers. Trackers can interact anywhere within your website and use-cases vary from reading out form fields, sending emails, save data to lists and much more.

To create a Tracker, navigate to Trackers in the top menu bar. Next click the "New Tracker" button.

You are now on the "Create Tracker" page, where you see the name of your Tracker in the top left, - which you can click to change - and in the middle of the screen you'll find two blocks. One named "Action #1" and the other "Event #1".

Setup an Action

A Tracker always start with an Action and this Action triggers at least one Event. It is up to you how you want to design each Tracker, but in this example we will build a simple Tracker, that executes when a certain element on the page gets clicked.

Once we click on the "Mouse click" action a side panel opens up where we can setup further details about this action. In the first step Sidetracker wants to know if the mouse click is either an Attribute or an Ahref.

The difference between the two options might be clear if you have some background knowledge in HTML. In a nutshell, the Ahref is used for hyper links within the <a href=" tag and Attributes can be used on every HTML element of your choice - most likely the <button tag.

For our example we will select Attribute from the dropdown. In the next step we will fill out the key and value for the attribute that we identify our button with. In this example we pick location=homepage which we will add to our button for this purpose, but you can easily leverage existing key value attributes by right-click on the webpage then select inspect. You can now select any element on the page and find a whole bunch of attributes to work with, corresponding the element you want to track.

Once we filled out the key and value of the attribute we can click "Save" and now it is time to setup the event following the mouse click action. This event will be executed once a visitor clicks on an element of your page element with the corresponding Attribute.

Setup an Event

Click on the "Event #1" block and notice a popup appears where you can choose one of many event types.

For this example we will select the "Add note" event.

The same setup panel as with Actions appears and this time with options related to the "Add note" event. You can add a note text that will be added to the visitors session once they click the element.

Publish the Tracker

Now we click "Save" and you'll notice that all check icons are now green and on the top right of the page we are allowed to "Publish" our Tracker!

Before we can publish a popup will appear asking you if you want to activate the Tracker immediately. By default this is checked, but there can be cases you want to uncheck this to prevent immediate tracking.

Manage Trackers

Now that we have our first Tracker up and running, you will see it in the overview. On the left you see two icons, when you hover them you'll see the outline of the trackers action and event(s).

You can delete multiple Trackers by selecting the checkboxes with the dropdown:

And on the right of each Tracker you'll find a dropdown where you can either delete or pause/activate the Tracker:

To edit a Tracker you can click on the name. First you will see just the overview of the Tracker, but on the top right you can click on the "Edit Tracker" button.

Once clicked you can edit the tracker the same way as shown before.

Our Tracker in action

If your domain is all setup and you make sure a button on your webpage has the corresponding attribute key=value , you can try out your Tracker by clicking the button.

Find your own visit session to see if it all works. A note should be added as seen in the image above.

Conclusion

I hope this article gives you a good idea on how to use and apply Trackers. If there are any questions don't hesitate to contact us. We are here to help!