ATC/Current/SDK/Web tracking API

Learn how to track visitor activity using an API.

Important

This article only applies to customers using web chat. If you are a Genesys Cloud CX customer, we encourage you to use the new web messaging feature to replace web chat.

About the Web Tracking API

The Web Tracking API lets you track what visitors do on your website. Tracking data is collected through a series of interactions occurring on your website such as pageviews, button clicks, and custom events. These interactions are grouped into visits and act as a container for the actions that a specific visitor takes on your website.

Visits do not have a predefined duration. Depending on your visitor, the visit may be a few seconds or a couple of hours long. A new visit is created when the visitor has been idle for 30 minutes or more, but they all are linked to the same visitor.

Obtain consent before tracking visitors

Important

To achieve compliance with GDPR requirements, consider whether you need to obtain a visitor's consent before tracking their data. For more information on using Genesys Predictive Engagement in a GDPR-compliant manner, see GDPR.

To implement tracking after receiving consent, modify the tracking snippet so that the `ac('init')` and `ac('pageview')` are only called when consent is given, as shown in the following example:

 (function(a,t,c,l,o,u,d){a['_genesysJourneySdk']=o;a[o]=a[o]||function(){
  (a[o].q=a[o].q||[]).push(arguments)},a[o].l=1*new Date();u=t.createElement(c),
  d=t.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];u.async=1;u.src=l;u.charset='utf-8';d.parentNode.insertBefore(u,d)
  })(window, document, 'script', 'https://apps.inindca.com/journey/sdk/js/web/v1/ac.js', 'ac');
if (consentGiven) {
// Call the ac('init') function to enable tracking  
  ac('init', 'a061a3fe-7a80-4b50-9d3b-df88c0f9efad', { region: 'use1' });
  ac('pageview');
}

You are responsible for setting the value for the `consentGiven` variable based on the visitor's choice.

Enable web tracking

To enable Web tracking on your website, initialize the Tracking SDK and then call the pageview method when a visitor navigates to a new page.

Stop tracking when a visitor revokes consent

If a visitor revokes consent at any point, invoke the destroy command to stop tracking and remove all cookies, as shown in the following example.

// to disable tracking and delete Genesys Predictive Engagement cookies
ac('destroy');

Types of tracked data

The Journey JavaScript SDK lets you customize how you collect tracking data for your website. The most basic form of tracking is page view tracking. For page view tracking, Genesys Predictive Engagement records each page a visitor visits. You can also use the Journey JavaScript SDK to record custom visitor activities such as button clicks. For more information see Track custom events.

Track viewed pages

The pageview method tracks the webpages that your visitors view. To send a pageview, call the ac function and pass pageview as the first argument.

ac('pageview');

Important

By default, the Genesys Predictive Engagement tracking snippet contains the ac function.

Track custom events

The record method allows you to track custom events, usually as a result of a person interacting with an element or control in your website. For example, the click of a button.

The record method takes two parameters:

• The name of the event to record as a string. Note: See Guidelines for custom event names.
• An (optional) key-value hash of properties for the event.
• An (optional) callback function that invokes when the request is completed.
• An (optional) callback timeout, in milliseconds, to configure how long to wait when the event takes too long to complete. This option is useful to capture events (such as file downloads) before navigating to a different page/URL, ensuring that the visitor is always redirected.

 
ac('record', 'section_opened');

You can also provide extra metadata with your custom event:

 
ac('record', 'button_clicked', {
  companyName: 'Acme Inc,',
  employees: '100-500'
});

The following code sample shows how to record a file download and navigate to the file URL /files/pricing.pdf when capturing the event, or after 400 milliseconds:

 
ac('record', 'file.downloaded', {
  name: 'Pricing',
  fileType: 'pdf'
}, function () {
  navigateTo('/files/pricing.pdf');
}, 400);

Guidelines for custom event names

Important

Event names:

• Must be less than 255 characters; we recommend keeping them short and descriptive
• Can contain any combination of alphanumeric characters, underscores, or hyphens only

The suggested format for custom event names is: object-delimiter-action, where object is the object that was interacted with, and action is the type of interaction that occurred.

Examples of custom event names include:

• "detected_errors"
• "section_failed"
• "section_submitted"
• "product_added"
• "product_removed"
• "address_selected"