How does Inbound Rocket track each visitor?
Inbound Rocket works pretty straightforward, as soon as you activate the plugin we will start tracking each anonymous visit to your website using three cookies (using the evercookie technique).
One cookie stores a unique identifier which doesn’t expire, this helps us to identify the visitor every time he or she returns. The second cookies stores the last visit and expires after an hour, this one helps us to track how often a visitor to your website returns. Finally, the third cookie stores whether or not someone is subscribed to the site yet. Inbound Rocket tracks where each visitor comes from, what pages they viewed and what actions they take on those pages. You own 100%, of your data and we don’t have access to it.
Inbound Rocket will track the page view activity of each visitor even before she becomes a contact. For example, if a person visits your website five separate times before filling out a form, Inbound Rocket will still include the previous visits int the contact timeline.
How does a visitor turn into a contact?
Inbound Rocket automatically integrates with most contact forms on your site that contain an email address field. The main two exceptions are forms that are submitted using jQuery and forms embedded via an iFrame.
Any time a still anonymous visitor fills out a form and an email address is present; Inbound Rocket will identify that visitor as a contact and store the timeline record in your viewable database of contacts inside of your WordPress Dashboard.
What happens when someone uses different devices or browsers?
Sometimes a person visiting your website will use a different browser or even a different device like a smartphone and a laptop. Since normal cookies can’t be passed in between two browsers, we already made sure that we can follow your visitor better by using the evercookie.
If however, your visitor is using a completely different device, there is still nothing to worry about. Even though with each device a unique identifier is being given to that person, as soon as another form is filled in, we can see that it was the same person all along. For example, lets say someone visits your website and at one point decides to fill in a form. From that moment in time, we know that person X is Jim, and all his future visits will be stored in the profile of Jim. A little bit later, Jim comes back on your website while he’s in the train on its way to work. He browses around and fills in another form using the same email address. At that point, Inbound Rocket will realize the anonymous mobile visitor is Jim from before. Inbound Rocket will then merge all his mobile history together with his previous desktop history. If Jim starts using his desktop computer again when he arrives at the office, his desktop cookie will be updated with the same identifier as his mobile and we will continue to track Jim as one person from that moment in time.