Identifying Anonymous Visitors

As part of our 12.3 release, ClickDimensions will no longer sync Anonymous Visitor records or their unidentified Page Views or IP Organizations to Dynamics. All page views and visits related to Anonymous Visitors will still be tracked within the ClickDimensions Service and will only be synced once the visitor is identified as either a Contact or a Lead to help reduce storage space consumption and API calls. For more details on this change, please see our article here.

When we can confirm a visitor's email address, then we can even recognize them as Leads or Contacts in your CRM. This process is called Identifying Anonymous Visitors and there are two different ways to enact it. Both ultimately rely on identifying the visitor's email address and associating it to a cookie in their browser. 

Your CNAMEs and Domain records need to be set up before creating your forms for the identification process to work. In order to tie web visit history to a Contact or Lead via a form submission, the domain of the form and the domain of your website need to match. Therefore, you'd need to have your CNAME created through your hosting provider and setup in ClickDimensions. If a CNAME is not associated to the domain used with your form, visitors will only be able to be identified when they click on a link in one of your emails.

Goals

• Learn about different ways that anonymous visitors can be identified via the ClickDimensions Tracking Script

Option 1: Submitting a Form

If someone fills out a ClickDimensions form or a Form Capture and supplies their email we will identify them. First, we will check to see if there is already a lead or contact in your environment with their email address. If there is, we will tie their record with their IP address and track them that way. If not, we will create a new lead or contact record (depending on your preference) with the submitted information.

NOTE: If no email address was supplied while submitting the form, we will try to associate the submission with the cookie in the browser from their visit.

NOTE: Surveys and Subscription Pages can also form an association between an email address and an IP address, which could result in a new lead or contact record. However, if a new lead or contact record is created that way, it will only be able to supply the email. This is due to the nature of Surveys and Subscription Pages. (Survey answers cannot be mapped to lead or contact records and Subscription Pages only take in subscription preferences.) Therefore, we recommend you do not rely on either to identify anonymous visitors.

Option 2: Clicking on a Link in an Email

If someone clicks on a link in an email that directs them to a page on your site that is being tracked via the ClickDimensions Tracking Script, we will be able to associate their IP address to their email. (The link in the email has their email address encoded in it.) It will also check first for a current match. Since you sent an email through ClickDimensions to this Lead or Contact, the email address should already be in your Dynamics environment. Therefore, the email recipient will become identified on your website by just clicking the link in your email.

Once we identify an anonymous visitor, all the scoring and tracking that was tied to the anonymous visitor will be associated with their Lead or Contact record. Any page views or visits that were connected to the anonymous visitor will then be synced to their identified Lead/Contact record.