In today’s digital business environment, all marketing efforts need to be powered by actionable data. Your customers leave multiple digital footprints across multiple platforms and channels.
To engage them in a personalised and relevant manner, you need to depend on customer data that is real-time, accurate, and provides a unified view of individual customers’ diverse personas and behaviours across channels. Customer activity tracking forms the backbone of all your website and app marketing activities.
And, this is precisely what Smartech helps you with, enabling you to bridge the gap between customer analytics and effective multi-channel engagement.
Keeping in line with our eternal desire to empower you as a data-driven marketer, we have enhanced our customer activity tracking feature, allowing you to now leverage even greater actionable data available at your disposal and improving the entire platform usage experience!
Here are two new features as part of that endeavour:
Auto-discovery of Customer Activities
Data security has always been our prime focus. Hence, in the earlier version of activity tracking feature, it was mandatory for marketers – like you – to create specific website and app activities (for instance, Add to Cart, Checkout, etc.) that you wanted to track on the Smartech panel along,
You also needed to assign respective payload parameters to each of these activities (for instance, Product Name, Price, etc.) and their respective data types (for instance, text, float, etc.)
Once you created the activity, Smartech automatically generated a website and app SDK code along with unique activity IDs. Placing this code in the website and app enabled activity tracking.
While this process had no loophole, but the integration of the code required a high degree of marketer-developer collaboration. The developers needed to define 3 activity payload parameters at the code level and you needed to refer to this list of payload parameters and data types to create the activities on Smartech. Once done, the developer had to verify the activity at the code level.
We wanted to reduce the manual effort involved, and speed-up the integration process, necessitating the development of the updated feature, i.e. simplifying the discovery of customer activities at an automatic level – auto-discovery!
In the new feature, developers can now pass any website or app activity to Smartech directly from the website or app, without needing the marketers to create the same on Smartech.
Smartech now automatically discovers the new website and app activities and the related payload parameters associated with the activity name. It saves the activity data in the database with incredible ease.
Whenever the developers edit the activity payload parameters, Smartech can now automatically discover the changes in real-time, and update the data-points at the backend accordingly.
One critical point to note is that the activity name on the website and app must remain the same to get the unified view of the customers.
The developers are free to make changes in the activity payload parameters as and when required and Smartech will automatically discover those changes for all the activities in real-time.
Here is a sample signature in which “smartech” is the function and “dispatch” is the method:
Auto-discovery of customer activities not only fast-tracks the integration process, but it also saves your time and effort, giving you more time to analyse customer behaviour to craft high-conversion hyper-personalised multi-channel campaigns.
Array Support for Special Customer Activities
There are certain activities which consist of multiple values/products associated with a single event. For example, Order Checkout, Product Purchase, Songs Added to Playlist, etc.
Simply put, there can be multiple items added to a shopping cart on an e-commerce app or many songs of different genres added to a personalised playlist on a music streaming website.
Such activities require special handling.
With the release of array support, developers can now seamlessly pass such special activities to Smartech using the “array” method.
Let’s break it down for you a little more.
Consider the case of an e-commerce app, ECOMAPP, that is using Smartech. A customer adds 4 different items to his cart, and logs out without completing the transaction. To get the customer to complete his purchase, ECOMAPP has a defined a retargeting campaign strategy across different channels. But the first important step is to record the customer’s activity details on the platform.
Every activity is defined on the app, along with payload parameters, against which the values are stored. In this case, the activity is “Product Purchase”, with “product_name”, “product_price”, “product_category”, etc. as the payload parameters.
Diving a little deeper, each parameter in this case has 4 values to be stored corresponding to the four items the customer has added to his cart.
| product_name | product_price | product_category |
| Product_name 1 | product_price_1 | Product_category_1 |
| Product_name 1 | product_price_2 | Product_category_2 |
| Product_name 1 | product_price_3 | Product_category_3 |
| Product_name 1 | product_price_4 | Product_category_4 |
This customer activity data is saved as a single event with the values of each parameter saved in an array, instead of 4 events corresponding to the four items.
This is what the code would look like for the same special activity, i.e. Product Purchase:
With this radical new feature, Smartech doesn’t just simplify the lives of developers, but also empowers marketers – like you – create granular customer segments based on such special activities.
For instance, you can now create segments on the basis of the “product brand” or “price” or use the combination of both to them send highly personalised and targeted multi-channel campaigns.
For more details, visit the Smartech Help Centre or, get in touch with us today!
