Treasure Data allows several options for tracking your customers’ activity on the web.
Web tracking allows you to see how your customer is interacting on the web so that you can understand more about where your customers are in the buying process and be able to tailor your interactions to increase conversions. Understanding how web tracking works is essential to understanding how Treasure Data can maximize your customization of the customer journey.
To understand web tracking, you must understand how to identify customers through 1 st party and 3rd party cookies as well as how you might track their behaviors through the use of web tagging , JavaScript SDK , and Postback REST APIs.
- Identify Your Users
- First Party Cookies
- Third Party Cookies
- Track User Behavior
- Web-Tagging
- Treasure Data JavaScript SDK (TD JS SDK Version 3)
- Treasure Data JavaScript SDK (TD JS SDK)
- Postback APIs
First party cookies are small text files places on the website user’s devices after they have visited the website. These cookies are issued by the company that owns the website and they help the company track the user’s behavior on their website. Learn more about Tracking Server-Side First Party Cookies on Your Website.
Third party cookies are technologically the same type of small text file, but are owned by someone other than the website owner. These are often placed by a third party who has, for example, an advertisement or a video on that website. Learn more about Anonymous Visitor IDs.
Web tagging enables the collection of unique information about a person as they move through a company’s website. The web tag collects information about their behavior and the cookies link it to a particular user.
Web tags require a lot of management and are commonly managed through a 3rd party web tag management system (TMS) such as Google Tag Manager, Yahoo! Tag Manager and Dynamic Tag Management. These managers make it easier to change tags as needed and allow for a more dynamic customer experience, by downloading the relevant tags for a certain page without them having to be recoded into the HTML.
Learn more about tag management with Google Tag Manager.
TD Fetch JavaScript SDK allows Treasure Data to store first-party cookies on your domain’s website and to then track your website’s users across the other platforms and collect information. By using the TD JS SDK version 3.0, you don’t have to install anything server-side to track website activities.
This version has been updated with the Fetch open-source API, which makes use of promise-based communications. A Fetch API promise is a proxy for a value not necessarily known when the promise is created. It allows you to associate handlers with an asynchronous action's eventual success value or failure reason. This lets asynchronous methods return values like synchronous methods: instead of immediately returning the final value, the asynchronous method returns a promise to supply the value at some point in the future.
A promise is in one of these states:
- pending : initial state, neither fulfilled nor rejected.
- fulfilled : meaning that the operation was completed successfully.
- rejected : meaning that the operation failed.
A pending promise can be fulfilled with a value or rejected with a reason (error). When either happens, the associated handlers queued up by a promise's method are called. If the promise has already been fulfilled or rejected when a corresponding handler is attached, the handler is called, so there is no race condition between an asynchronous operation completing and its handlers being attached.
The Treasure Data JavaScript SDK version 3 is based on the Fetch open-source API. It continues to work with all of the RESTful API HTTP methods (POST, GET, PUT…). And it accommodates Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for HTTP-header-based mechanisms to allows a server to indicate any other origins (domain, scheme, or port) than its own from which a browser should permit loading of resources.
Learn more about Enabling Cross-Domain Tracking with Javascript SDK.
TD JavaScript SDK allows Treasure Data to store first-party cookies on your domain’s website and to then track your website’s users across the other platforms and collect information. By using the TD JS SDK, you don’t have to install anything server-side to track website activities. Learn more about Treasure Data JavaScript SDK.
In cases where JavaScript SDK can’t be used, Postback APIs can be used. Postback APIs are used to track conversions and send that data back to Treasure Data without loading anything into your web page. They can be used to track customer behaviors through emails as well. For example, when you send out an email, Postback APIs can track if the recipient, not only opened the email but clicked on any of the links.
To learn about Postback API and Tracking Pixels.