Most of us have seen this graphic before. It is from Google analytics and shows the breakdown of your traffic based on whether it came from search engines, direct (i.e. the visitor typed in your URL or used a bookmark) or referring sites.

Well, this is deceiving at best because most of us our search engines as a substitute for typing in the URL. Instead of bookmarking www.clickdimensions.com, we go to our Google or Bing search boxes on our browsers and type in clickdimensions or something similar.

Using our own solution we can see the keywords that are used when people visit us from search engines. Since we classify each visit based on whether it came from a search engine, social site (we keep an extensive list), email link click or direct/bookmark link we are able to query all visits classified as coming from search engines and then inspect the keywords.

The result of this analysis is that we see a lot of visits that are technically search engine visits but, since they used branded keywords (i.e. our name or our product name) we can really think of them as direct traffic because the visitor clearly knew about us.

This is great because it allows us to clearly see visitors that came upon us from non-branded keywords like ‘marketing automation’ or ‘dynamics crm marketing’. When we see a combination of a growing lead score from a visitor that used non-branded keywords we can quickly assess their value as a prospect. Below is a great example. We have one visitor that came to us from a search on ‘powered by windows azure’. Now, while our solution is powered by windows azure, people buy it because it provides marketing automation functionality. So, there’s probably no point in spending time on this visitor and, as you can see, he/she didn’t accumulate a high score.

In contrast, the visitor below came to us from keywords that related perfectly to our solution and, thus, was very interested and built a high lead score. In addition, because ClickDimensions aggregates all traffic from IP addresses, once we identified one person from this prospect, we could see that several others had also been on the site expressing strong interest. At that point, we knew our odds were good and this tempered the sales cycle. They are now a satisfied customer.

 

Because of the way web tracking data is modeled in the ClickDimensions solution, it is very easy to see all web traffic coming from a specific IP address. Since companies and organizations often have all their internet traffic coming from a single IP address, this allows you to really see collectively when multiple individuals from an organization are interested in your products and services.

Here’s how it works. Every time someone visits our site we identify the IP address from which they are visiting and we create a record called an IP Organization record. We then link all future visitors, visits, page views and form submissions made from that IP address to the IP Organization record. This allows you to see the combined interested of all visitors from the organization. Because everything is scored, you have an easy way to determine organizations that may be worth prospecting.

Below is an example of an IP Organization record our system created when one of the large players in our market, Eloqua, has visited our site.

If we click on the Anonymous Visitors tab we can see that this traffic was generated by 17 unique individuals (technically, 17 unique cookies most likely in 17 unique browsers) visiting from Eloqua.

 

There are three additional scripts you can add to your webpages to customize the information.

Score

You can insert a script parameter to override the default score for specific web pages. Simply add the following three lines of script to the pages whose score you would like to override. The script should be placed before the base tracking script. Note that the score value can be negative by adding the “–“ symbol directly before the score value. For example, the javavscript could be “var cdScore = -25;”. You may have as many custom scored pages as you like.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var cdScore = 5;
</script>

Priority Page

You can insert a script parameter to highlight specific pages in the Tracking Summary of the Profile pages. Simply add the following three lines of script to the pages you would like to highlight. The script should be placed before the base tracking script. These are referred to as ‘priority pages’.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var cdPriority = true;
</script>

Associate with Campaign

Page Views and Visits can be automatically associated with Campaign records in Microsoft CRM. Simply add the following three lines of script to the pages you would like to associate with CRM campaign records. Be sure and substitute the campaign code listed below (i.e. CMP-01005-ZBPTHS) with the CRM generated campaign code to which you would like the Page Views and Visits associated.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var cdCampaignKey = ‘CMP-01005-ZBPTHS’;
</script>

In CRM 4.0, ClickDimensions automatically installs a dashboard for you to view Web Statistics. To view it, go to Marketing > ClickDimensions > Dashboard

Please note there is less information here than would normally be present due to these reports being generated in our test environment.

Visitor Distribution

This pie chart shows the different types of Visitors that have accessed your site: Anonymous, Lead, or Contact. (Notice you can hover over the chart for more information.) Anonymous Visitors are visitors who have not been identified yet and these records are created when a new visitor accesses your website. (In order to identify them, we must first link them to an email address.) We keep information on Anonymous Visitors such as a score just as we do Leads and Contacts. Once we associate an IP address with Leads and Contacts, we can also track their visits with your website as well, as is shown here.

You may also notice the social network based percentages at the bottom. Those are the percentage of Leads and Contacts that have been found on those social sites through Social Discovery.

New Leads

This graph of the number of leads created in your CRM recently. It also provides additional information if you hover over one of the points.

Recently Active Leads

This is a collection of Leads that have recently visited your website, and the most recent Lead visiting your website is listed at the top. These records can be especially helpful if you have set your forms or surveys to create any new visitors who submit them as leads.

Identified Organizations

Identified Organizations are organizations whose IP address ClickDimensions has noticed accessing your site.

The IP Organization will have a name, which is the registered name for that IP address (please keep in mind that the name may represent the network provider for the visitor). Much of the time we can also can provide geographical information based on the IP as well.

Other dashboards include the CRM 2011 Analytics Records dashboard and the CRM 2011 Email Events Analysis dashboard.

Dashboards are customizable views that can display various records and charts from your CRM. They come standard with CRM, but you can also view ClickDimensions content within them and, in CRM 2011, dynamically edit them.

In CRM 2011, ClickDimensions automatically installs two dashboards for you to view both Email Marketing and Web Statistics. To view them, go to Workplace > Dashboards and then on the “Views” menu select either ClickDimensions Analytics Records or ClickDimensions Email Events Analysis. This article will cover the Analytics Dashboard.

Active IP Organizations

Active IP Organizations are the records of IP Organizations who have accessed your website.

IP Organizations are organizations whose IP address ClickDimensions has noticed accessing your site. The IP Organization will have a name, which is the registered name for that IP address (please keep in mind that the name may represent the network provider for the visitor). Much of the time we can also can provide geographical information based on the IP as well.

Active Anonymous Visitors

Active Anonymous Visitors are visitors who have not yet identified as a Lead or Contact in CRM. At this point, the only information ClickDimensions can gather about the Anonymous Visitor is its IP Organization information. You can identify Anonymous Visitors through ClickDimensions emails and forms.

Active Visits

Active Visits are all the active logs of the instance of someone visiting your site. The most recent Visit record is listed at the top.

Active Page Views

Page Views show each individual page that has been viewed on your website.

Visits by IP Country

This shows a graph of the countries who have most frequently visited your web site (as determined by their IP address). You can click on the bars on the graph for more information as well as the icons in the top right corner that appear when you hover.

You may click to see the records that make the graph as well as enlarging the graph with these icons.

Active Posted Forms

Posted Forms are records created every time a form is submitted. You can open these Posted Form records to view the individual fields that were submitted within the form as well.

Other dashboards include the CRM 2011 Email Events Analysis dashboard and the CRM 4.0 dashboard.

Introduction

[Watch the Videos below]

ClickDimensions Web Tracking tracks the visitors that come to your site on a micro level. You are able to see individual Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Anonymous Visitors who land on your site. You will need the web tracking script placed on all the websites and webpages you want to track. If you have not completed those steps, refer to the ClickDimensions Initial Setup Section of this guide.

ClickDimensions Web Tracking Entities

ClickDimensions creates custom entities in the Marketing area of CRM under the Analytics section. These entities are:

IP Organizations

The organization that is associated with the IP address your visitors are using when visiting your website. Think of the IP Organization as the umbrella of a company’s interaction with your website. If you have multiple visitors from one company, you will be able to see those visits in the IP Organization record, and other web tracking information as well. All web tracking information will point back to an IP Organization.

Anonymous Visitors

These records represent visitors that have visited your site, but have not been identified as a Lead, Contact, or Account.

Visits

These records contain information regarding all the visits Anonymous Visitors, Leads, Contacts, and Accounts have made by visiting your website.

Page Views

These records are created when a visitor views a page on your website.

Posted Forms

When a visitor submits a form on your website that is integrated with ClickDimensions and your CRM, ClickDimensions creates a Posted Form record that holds the information submitted with the form.

Posted Fields

Posted Fields are the individual fields that were filled out within a form. You can see them in the Posted Form record and in a list of all submitted posted fields under Posted Fields in the Marketing area of CRM.

Posted Surveys

When a person submits a ClickDimensions survey on your website, a Posted Survey record was created. Each record contains the answers to the questions in the survey. (The Survey feature is available for Standard packages and higher)

Survey Answers

Survey Answers are individual records that contain an answer to a question in a ClickDimensions Survey. These records can be found in the Posted Survey record, as well as in a running list of all Survey Answer records in the Marketing area of CRM.

Location of Web Tracking Entities

These entities are located in a number of places throughout CRM.

The main area where you can see these records is in Marketing > Analytics (ClickDimensions in CRM 4).

You can also find these records in Lead, Contact, and Account records. These records will be unique to the record you are looking at.

For various Web Tracking elements, such as web pages and web forms, you can associate them with a Campaign record. For example, when you associate a form with a Campaign record, you will be able to see all Posted Form records in the CRM Campaign record.

The Profile page, located in Lead and Contact records, is another location you can find some of these web tracking records. In the Profile page, you can see all web visits this Lead or Contact has made and specific page views (by inserting the Priority Page script on the web page). You can also see posted form fields the Lead or Contact had previously filled out via a form that is integrated with ClickDimensions.

Watch the Video on IP Organizations and Anonymous Visitors

Watch the Video on Anonymous Visitors, Visits, and Page Views

Add Tracking Script

[Watch the Video below]

Locate the tracking script and place on your web pages in order for the traffic from your web site to be tracked inside your CRM you will need to place a block of JavaScript code on each of your web pages. This is usually accomplished by placing the javascript into your global footer file or any other mechanism that causes it to be placed on each page. It is best to place the JavaScript toward the bottom of the page and always before the end body tag </body> for the page. Locate your script by going to Settings > ClickDimensions > ClickDimensions Settings > Script Example.

When you click on Tracking Script you will see your unique script. Be sure are read the instructions on the page to understand how to place the script.

NOTE: If the script is being placed on a site that has a different domain than what is in the cdAnalytics.setDomain parameter then change that text to the domain of the site when you place the script on the site. For example, the tracking script shown above has the following line:
cdAnalytics.setDomain(‘clickdimensions.com’);

If your website is at www.mycompany.com, you will change the line in the script to:
cdAnalytics.setDomain(‘mycompany.com’);

Add a Domain Record

The next step is to add a Domain record to tell our system that it is OK to accept tracking from this  domain. You do this by going to Settings > ClickDimensions > Domains and clicking the  new button to add a new Domain record. (The domain name is your website domain without the http://www.)

Watch a Video on Inserting Tracking Script

The “Subdomain Alias” field on a Domain Record

The subdomain alias field can be used to brand the links to Web Content (forms, surveys, subscription management pages, and landing pages) that are hosted on the analytics.clickdimensions.com servers. For example, if your website is at mycompany.com you may wish to set up a subdomain alias, such as web.mycompany.com, and use this to point to ClickDimensions Web Content records. For more information, see this CNAME Setup article.

Does ClickDimensions track visits to my website by search engines?

Yes. Placing the ClickDimensions tracking script on a webpage will record visits to that page by search engine bots or crawlers, such as those used by Google and Bing to index pages on the web.

While you can filter specific IP addresses by creating filter records (in CRM go to Settings > ClickDimensions > Filters and create a new Filter record with a specific IP address), this method may not be effective in filtering out the visits from search engines, since most search engines have a long list of IP addresses that may change from time-to-time.

An alternative is to use the view customization tools in CRM to remove these automated visits from your analysis. For frequent use, customize the views of the Page View or Visit entities to filter out unwanted IP Organizations. To learn how to customize the views in CRM, see here.

For ad hoc analysis, you can filter the Active Page Views view to remove unwanted IP Organizations from the view following the steps in the following illustrations:

What is Web Tracking Used for?

Web Tracking will give you insight on how your website is being used and record the traffic that accesses it. You can see which pages have been clicked on, how long a user spent on a certain page, and how they got to your website, among other valuable information. This can be used to see which contacts may potentially have the most interest in the content on your website.

How to Use Web Tracking

The ClickDimensions February 2013 release has made significant changes to the way that web analytics and posted forms are synchronized to our customers’ CRM systems. As a result of the changes made in the ClickDimensions cloud application, our customers should immediately deactivate the following plugin steps in their CRM:

• PageViewPlugin (two steps registered on the Create of the Page View entity)
• PostedFormPlugin (two steps registered on the Create of the Posted Form entity)
• PostedSubscriptionPlugin (one step registered on the Create of the Posted Subscription entity)
• PostedSurveyPlugin (one step registered on the Create of the Posted Survey entity)
• ScorePlugin (two steps registered on the Create and Update of the Contact entity, and two steps registered on the Create and Update of the Lead entity)
• VisitPlugin (three steps registered on the Create and Update of the Visit entity)

There are a total of 13 plugin steps that must be deactivated:

To deactivate a plugin step in CRM 2011 or CRM Online:

1. Log into CRM as a user with the System Administrator security role.
2. Navigate to Settings > Customizations > Customize the System. This will open the default solution in CRM containing all customizations.
3. Click on Sdk Message Processing Steps on the left side of the solution window.
4. Select the plugin steps listed above and click on the Deactivate button:
   
   Watch a video demonstration:

To deactivate plugin steps in CRM 4.0:

To deactivate plugin steps in CRM 4.0, the Plugin Registration tool must be used. Please contact ClickDimensions support if you require assistance.

The CRM 4.0 pluginregistration.exe can be downloaded from here: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/crmplugin/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2010

Using the plugin registration tool, connect to your CRM 4.0 organization and expand the ClickDimensions plugin to view the registered steps. Select the steps noted above and disable them in the plugin registration tool UI.

The table below lists the cookies that are placed in a visitor’s browser when the ClickDimensions tracking script is being used on the visited web page, their use and expiration.

A Domain Record is a record of the domain of any website upon which you intend to place the ClickDimensions tracking script on or embed a Form, Survey, Landing Page, or Subscription Management page on. Domain records are used in conjunction with the tracking script to track web events.

Watch a Video on Creating a Domain Record

Article Mentioned in Video: Setup CNAMEs

Written Instructions

Domain Records can be created at Settings > ClickDimensions > Domains.

To create a domain record, first click New. You have two fields to fill out: Name and Sub Domain Alias. The Name field will contain the domain of the website you are tracking without http:// or www (for example, clickdimensions.com, not http://www.clickdimensions.com). The Sub Domain masks Web Content with a domain name of your choosing and should be created when you setup CNAMEs. When you have filled in the information for the record, click Save and Close or Save and New if you have multiple domains you want to track.

NOTE: Do not create multiple domain records for the same domain

After you have created your Domain record, the next step is to put the tracking script on your page!

And don’t forget to set up your CNAMEs!

The ClickDimensions February 2013 release has made significant changes to the way that web analytics and posted forms are synchronized to our customers’ CRM systems. As a result of the changes made in the ClickDimensions cloud application, our customers should immediately deactivate the following plugin steps in their CRM:

• PageViewPlugin (two steps registered on the Create of the Page View entity)
• PostedFormPlugin (two steps registered on the Create of the Posted Form entity)
• PostedSubscriptionPlugin (one step registered on the Create of the Posted Subscription entity)
• PostedSurveyPlugin (one step registered on the Create of the Posted Survey entity)
• ScorePlugin (two steps registered on the Create and Update of the Contact entity, and two steps registered on the Create and Update of the Lead entity)
• VisitPlugin (three steps registered on the Create and Update of the Visit entity)

There are a total of 13 plugin steps that must be deactivated:

To deactivate a plugin step in CRM 2011 or CRM Online:

1. Log into CRM as a user with the System Administrator security role.
2. Navigate to Settings > Customizations > Customize the System. This will open the default solution in CRM containing all customizations.
3. Click on Sdk Message Processing Steps on the left side of the solution window.
4. Select the plugin steps listed above and click on the Deactivate button:
   
   Watch a video demonstration.

To deactivate plugin steps in CRM 4.0:

To deactivate plugin steps in CRM 4.0, the Plugin Registration tool must be used. Please contact ClickDimensions support if you require assistance.

The CRM 4.0 pluginregistration.exe can be downloaded from here: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/crmplugin/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2010

Using the plugin registration tool, connect to your CRM 4.0 organization and expand the ClickDimensions plugin to view the registered steps. Select the steps noted above and disable them in the plugin registration tool UI.

ClickDimensions can be set up to track multiple websites as easily as it can be to track one. Tracking additional sites can be accomplished through the following steps:

This article discusses tracking a second website, but the method here can be applied to as many extras sites as you need to track.

Create a domain record for the second site that you want to track.

First, create a domain record for the second website that you want to track by navigating to Settings > ClickDimensions > Domains, then clicking new and filling out the blank domain record. Insturctions on how to set up a domain record can be found here.

Add the tracking script to the second site

Next place the tracking script on the second site. The tracking script can be found at Settings > ClickDimensions > ClickDimensions Settings > Tracking Script. Instructions on how to add the tracking script to your site can be found here.

Replace the domain in the tracking script with the domain for your second site.

By default, the domain in the tracking script will be the domain for your primary website. Replace the domain in the tracking script in the line

cdAnalytics.setDomain(‘yourcompany.com’);

with the domain name from the domain record that you created for your second website.

cdAnalytics.setDomain(‘newdomain.com’);

Many people use both ClickDimensions tracking code and Google Analytics code. We do it too. There is a newer version of Google Analytics code described in their article here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/advanced. If you use this version and our code, your Google Analytics will not work. This is due to a conflict in our codes. Google states in their article that their ‘ga’ variable might conflict with other objects, and we have found that it does. They offer a suggested workaround, described below, that is simple to implement. We are working to see what we can do to prevent this conflict, but until then, Google’s recommendation is as follows:

There are three instances of “ga” in this Google Analytics code, if you change that variable to something else like ‘_gaTracker’ it will work.

You can see this is explained in the same article linked above. There is a section called “Renaming the Global Object” that explains that this is okay to change this variable.

ClickDimensions has updated the web tracking script in order to remove some functions that are being depreciated by some browsers. The older script will continue to work for most browsers for some time, however it is important to update your script as soon as possible.

To find your new script, in your CRM go to Settings > ClickDimensions Settings > Tracking Script.

Choose Tracking Script.

You can copy the script there and replace the ClickDimensions script that is already on your website.

To learn more about web tracking with ClickDimensions read this help article.