Enabling activity tracking

Kentico EMS required

Features described on this page require the Kentico EMS license.

To allow tracking of activities for contacts, you need to:

  1. Open the Settings application.
  2. Navigate to On-line marketing and ensure that the Enable on-line marketing setting is checked for your website.
  3. Navigate to the On-line marketing -> Contact management -> Activities and enable the Log activities setting.
  4. Enable or disable logging of specific activity types using the other settings in the category.
  5. Save the settings.

You can additionally configure logging of activities for specific pages, visitors and certain features. The system only tracks activities within a given scope if all related settings are enabled. See the sections below for more information.

Logging activities immediately

By default, the system logs activities into temporary files and batch-processes them periodically using a scheduled task. As a result, there is a slight delay of up to several minutes before activity-related data is updated in the user interface

You can configure the system to log activities directly into the database. Immediately logging activities can generate a very high database load, so it is only recommended when evaluating or testing the functionality of activities, not for live websites.

To enable immediate logging of activities, administrators with access to the project’s file system need to add the following key to the appSettings section of the web.config file:




 <add key="CMSLogActivityImmediatelyToDB" value="true" />


Tracking file downloads

The system can track file downloads as Page visit activities for files stored as CMS.File documents in the content tree of a website. The Track file downloads (cms.file) for these extensions setting in the General section specifies which types of files the tracking includes.

Enter the allowed file types as a list of extensions separated by semicolons, for example: pdf;docx;png

If left empty, the system tracks all file types.

Enabling activities for specific pages

You can enable or disable logging of page-related activities (e.g. Page visit, Landing page or Content rating activity types) for individual pages on your website.

  1. Select the document representing the page in the Pages application.
  2. Open the Properties -> General tab.
  3. In the On-line marketing category, enable the Log on-line marketing activity property.
    • If the Inherit field is checked, the document loads the value from the parent document.
  4. Click Save.

By default, documents inherit the value of the Log on-line marketing activity property from their parent document. This state allows you to configure activity logging for all documents on the website through the root document.

Selecting the logging method for page activities

The system provides two different ways of logging activities related to website traffic (Page visit and Landing page):

Processing activities on every web request

Using JavaScript

Advantages:

  • Provides statistics for all types of web requests.

Advantages:

  • Filters out activities generated by non-human tools such as RSS readers and web crawlers.
  • Provides more accurate and relevant data for most public-facing websites.

Disadvantages:

  • May log irrelevant activities for non-human contacts such as web crawlers, RSS readers and other bots.

Disadvantages:

  • Ignores users with browsers that do not support JavaScript or have it disabled (typically less than 1% of all visitors).
  • May not work correctly on pages that run custom JavaScripts (if conflicts occur). The logging is compatible with all default Kentico scripts.

In most cases, it is recommended to use JavaScript logging. Switching to JavaScript logging does not reduce the performance of the website.

To enable JavaScript logging:

  1. Open the Settingsapplication.
  2. Navigate to On-line marketing -> Web Analytics.
  3. Enable the Log via JavaScript snippet setting.
  4. Save the settings.

Note: The Log via JavaScript snippet setting also determines how the system logs web analytics.

Disabling activity logging for particular visitors

By default, the system tracks activities for all contacts. You can disable activity tracking for individual contacts or the user accounts of registered users.

Contacts:

  1. Open the Contact management application.
  2. Edit () the given contact.
  3. Disable Track activities on the General tab.
  4. Click Save.

Users:

  1. Open the Users application.
  2. Find and edit() the given user account.
  3. Open the Settings tab.
  4. Disable the Log activities property.
  5. Click Save.

The activities performed by the visitor (or registered user) will no longer be recorded.

Enabling activity logging for specific applications

You can choose whether the system logs the related activity types for individual instances of the following applications:

Application

Related activity types

To enable/disable activities

Newsletters

  • Newsletter subscription
  • Newsletter unsubscription
  • Opened newsletter e-mail
  • Clicked newsletter link
  1. Open the Newsletters application.
  2. Edit () a newsletter.
  3. Enable the Log on-line marketing activities property on the Configuration tab.

Forums

  • Forum post
  • Forum post subscription
  1. Open the Forums application.
  2. Edit () a forum group or specific forum.
  3. Enable the Log on-line marketing activity property on the General tab.

Message boards

  • Message board comment
  • Message board subscription
  1. Open the Message boards application.
  2. Select the Boards tab.
  3. Edit () a message board.
  4. Enable the Log on-line marketing activity property on the General tab.

Polls

  • Poll voting
  1. Open the Polls application.
  2. Edit () a poll.
  3. Enable the Log on-line marketing activity property on the General tab.