Edit

Share via

Set up real-time web personalization (preview)

  • Article

[This article is prerelease documentation and is subject to change.]

Let Customer Insights - Data automatically create unknown profiles for your visitors and track their website interactions (page views and interactions) in real time. Set up web tracking, merge customers with their known profiles when they authenticate on your website, and then personalize your customers web experience.

Learn more: Real-time web personalization overview.

Prerequisites

  • Source data that contains your website customers are ingested and unified. Customer Insights - Data uses the primary key from the unified customer profile to identify your website visitors. The primary key should be a field that uniquely identifies a customer such as email, phone, or loyaltyId.

    For example, in Customer Insights - Data you have a source table called LoyaltySignUps with LoyaltyId as the primary key that uniquely identifies a customer in that table.

Set up web tracking

  1. Sign in to Customer Insights - Data and select Web tracking & personalization.

    Screenshot of Web tracking & personalization.

  2. Select the table that the tracking script should use to identify your customers when they authenticate.

  3. Copy the tracking script and paste it in the <head> tag of your website.

    If you're using a tag manager such as Google Tag Manager, go to the Google Tag Manager portal. Select Add new tag > Tag configuration > Custom HTML > paste the Customer Insights - Data tracking script > Save.

    If you're using a Content Management System (CMS) such as Wordpress, your CMS provider should have an easy way to add a script to the header. Example from Wordpress: https://wordpress.com/support/adding-code-to-headers/.

  4. Browse your website like a visitor.

  5. To view the unknown profiles, go to the Customers page and select Unknown. All unknown profiles have a cookieId as an identifier and the website interactions on the timeline automatically display.

    Screenshot of Unknown tab on Customers page.

  6. To validate the web events in Dataverse, sign in to https://make.powerapps.com/. Select Tables > All and select the PersonalizationView and PersonalizationAction tables.

Authenticate unknown customers and merge them to known

To have Customer Insights - Data automatically merge an unknown profile into a known profile, select the source table you used to identify your website customers.

  1. Sign in to Customer Insights - Data and select Web tracking & personalization.

  2. Select the table that identifies an unknown profile to merge it with a known profile. For example, the source table 'LoyaltySignUps' in Customer Insights - Data uses 'LoyaltyId' as the primary key, which uniquely identifies a customer in that table. To identify and merge unknown and known profiles, the system needs to know the 'LoyaltyId' of the visitor when they authenticate on your website. This is done by calling the 'SetUser' function.

  3. Define the setUser function on your website. Typically, you only define this function on the page that authenticates visitors. The identifier is the visitor ID. For example, Loyalty1.

    <script>
    function setUser() {
        window["MSCI"].setUser({ "authId": "<identifier>" });
 }
</script>

  4. Call the setUser function when a visitor authenticates.

    <button type="submit" onclick="setUser()">Submit</button>

Note

You can only select tables in the dropdown that were used as one of the source tables for data unification. Customer Insights - Data automatically uses the primary key of this table to identify the visitor. The merge logic is the same as in the data unification process.

Personalize your customers web experience

There are two ways to personalize your customers web experience:

  • No-code web personalization using Optimizely

  • Pro-code web personalization using APIs

    To personalize the web experience of your visitors using APIs, query any of the Customer Insights - Data APIs that allow you to retrieve rich information about each customer such as demographic information, web interactions, activities, segments, and measures.

    Since the cookieIds are also used to uniquely identify a customer (unknown or known), you can also use the cookieId to query a profile. To query a profile, retrieve the Customer Insights - Data web tracking cookie on the server side of your website. Customer Insights - Data cookies are stored as "_msci" in the request. If using C#, the cookie of the current visitor can be accessed:

    string cookieId = Request.Cookies["_msci"]; //CI-D cookie

    This cookie can then be used as an identifier to query any of the Customer Insights - Data APIs.

See also