It's good to know what changes trackers may be making in general in this new age of cookie censorship and consent, and some of the cool changes we're making for a brigher tracking future.
So, see our recent updates below!
General Updates
We have been working with a few customers using Clickbank and Clickfunnels and have come up with new/improved integrations.
Our Clickbank IPN integration now works for vendors and can track upsells. It's very easy to implement. You can read more here.
We also tried to crack the ClickFunnels code (metaphorically speaking) and have added a webhook feature. You can find this on the system links page and documentation here.
You can now mirror your ClickFunnel flow setup in FunnelFlux and use our integration to track users through the funnels, their purchases, upsells, etc.
Both of these allow you to take the powerful tracking of FunnelFlux and complement these systems. Especially useful if you are using paid traffic.
These integrations/changes are quite new so do let us know if you encounter any situations where its not tracking the way you expect.
GDPR-related Changes
IP Masking
In order to be compliant you need to mask IP as this is considered personal data of a user, despite how silly that may sound given the IP pooling that goes on and the fact you're not an ISP with access to customer-IP relationship data. Well, I guess you could be?
So, we have added IP masking with settings of All, EU IPs and disabled. You can set the default in the system settings area and can override this in the advanced settings of every funnel.
This is on by default for all IPs since technically an EU resident currently on a non-EU IP is still protected by GDPR.
Note: we don't osbcure IPs when we believe the IP is from a datacentre, VPN, proxy etc. as we don't consider these personal IPs and you need to see these IPs to use traffic filters easily.
If you turn off IP anonymisation, do so knowing that this reduces your "compliance by default" and its your responsibility to manage any GDPR compliance for your own activity with the software.
Data Removal
We have added the ability to reset stats by a specific visitor ID.
This will let you purge all data for a user based on their known visitor ID, which you can look up from a report easily (use the flat table > add some grouping option that has personal data identifying the user > add visitor ID as well > boom can find their ID).
Javascript updates
Two changes we made here of note in the context of GDPR:
The iFrame generated by the JS returns a bunch of useful info. We removed user IP from this.
We developed a no-cookie mode, which I will detail in the next section (woohoo no consent blocking!)
Javascript Tracking Changes
This is the main thing we have been working away at.
Redirects are slowly becoming less and less desirable in the performance marketing community, with issues arising with Facebook, a trend toward Ecommerce where you can't change all your site links to tracker ones.
Universal Funnel JS
You can now find a universal funnel JS code in the advanced settings area of a funnel.
You can take this code and put it on every lander/offer in a specific funnel instead of needing to generate code for each one.
When users click between pages the JS will track their movements without actually needing action links, though we suggest you still use these if possible.
When you use the same landers in different funnels you'll be able to specify funnel ID in URLs (as well as node ID) so that you don't need to duplicate landers and put different code in them.
The universal JS is a step in the right direction and we plan to continually refine/improve this to make tracking easier.
New JS Features
As part of developing our Clickbank/Clickfunnels integrations, and cookieless tracking, we needed to add functionality that lets the JS inject data into the URL, links and form submits.
This is great as it lets the JS manipulate pages to make tracking "just work" without you needing to change code everywhere.
We haven't been able to make a full guide on the new JS features yet, since we only finished some of these a few days ago and have been focused on good ol' GDPR, but here are the cliff notes:
For dynamic token injection, you can specify the HTML selectors these process, and in most cases this will involve adding a class to your links and other elements so that it can be specific.
Cookieless Tracking
We have created a cookieless JS tracking mode that uses session IDs to provide coherent tracking without a need for cookies.
We previously added functionality to pass hit ID in action links. This goes beyond that.
With this feature you can pass a session ID into both action links and normal links that go to another page.
When you send people to another page the tracker will retrieve this session value from the URL or referrer and continue the user journey.
This lets you set up tracking of a site/flow without using cookies and without using action links, simply by passing a session value from page to page. Pretty cool eh!
In cases where cookies are completely disabled and only no-redirect JS is used (no action links), you can use the "into links" token injection of the JS to push the session value between pages.
We'll create documentation on this soon along with these other updates now that the GDPR hudle has passed.
The Future?
We have plans to add extra details to the response the JS provides so that users can pull out data like country, ISP etc., and we'll add a new "EU-region" param to make it easy to get a simple yes/no about whether that user is inside an EU country.
We'll be further developing our cookieless JS and guides on this, and are looking at other ways to make our tracking more robust where the software just "figures it out" rather than requiring explicit data passing from you.
All these JS updates are optional, you can still use the old JS methods but just be sure not to mix and match - use one or the other, not both at the same time.
So, that's all for now - post here if you have any questions :-)