Introduction
In order to understand how data is tracked and organized you should become familiar with several important concepts, including Visit (a term used interchangeably with Session), User (a term used interchangeably with Visitor), and different types of data points: (A) Attributes, (M) Meta Events, and (E) Interactive Events.
Note that your own website or other analytics tools are likely to have their own different concepts and implementation of those terms.
Visit
A Visit starts every time a User opens a website with UseItBetter tracking code in a browser tab. At that point, the tracking code is initiated and a request to start tracking is sent to the UseItBetter server. Unless the request comes from an IP that is blacklisted or the request was rejected due to the project’s sampling settings, the server will send back to the tracking code a response to track the visit.
A single User can have multiple active Visits opened in separate browser tabs.
User
There is a User behind every Visit.
Whether a Visit is tracked or not (for reasons mentioned above), the tracking code assigns every new user a random, anonymous (A) userID which is stored in the browser’s persistent Local Storage in a similar way to cookies. Unless the user cleaned up Local Storage, every Visit from that browser will contain the same userID and each visit by the same user will have an incremental index tracked as (A) userVisit.
If the same person visits the website from different devices, or uses different browsers, that person will be identified as different users.
If your website can more precisely identify a visitor, for example because they register or sign in in at some point, you can track (A) appID attribute which, when crossmatched with (A) userID, will allow you to identify the visitor before he or she signs in.
You should never use a user’s e-mail address as (A) appID since it is considered personally identifiable information. Instead, to protect users’ privacy, you should use a hash (MD5) of an e-mail address or a permanent ID assigned by your CRM*, for example:
uDash.saveAttribute('appID', '91162629d258a876ee994e9233b2ad87');
* Interpretation of what is and what isn’t personally identifiable information (PII) varies from country to country. It can also be regulated by your company’s Privacy Policy. In general, any data point that allows a receiving party to identify a person with reasonable efforts is considered PII.
Data Points
UseItBetter automatically collects lots of Data Points during every Visit.
The Data Points that describe a Visit and a User are called (A) Attributes and include information about the time of a visit, the user’s device, its software and hardware configuration, the source of the visit, and so on.
The Data Points called (M) Meta Events usually describe the content a User is seeing or interacting with (for example names of pages visited, URL addresses, prices of products), or summarize the user’s activity with that content (time spent on a page) or how a website responded to the user’s activity (displayed errors message).
These data points are similar to data tracked by Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, either automatically or saved as custom events.
What differentiates UseItBetter from those tools, is that UseItBetter automatically collects every single interaction the User makes with a website. Every single click, mouse move, and completed form field are automatically tracked, allowing you to measure and analyze those behaviors, their impact on your goals, and associated financial metrics. Those data points are called (E) Interactive Events.
Read the “Types of Data Points” article to learn about specifics for each type of data point.
Index of Data Points
The full list of data points tracked automatically during a visit is given in “Index of Predefined Data Points”.
You can track your own data points using the JavaScript API or with Triggers.