Act-On provides all accounts with a Beacon code that can help you track data from your website's visitors. You can then leverage this data to send alerts to your sales team, build segments to target contacts and leads who visit specific pages of your site, and much more.

To begin gathering data, you'll first need to add the Beacon code to your website. This article will help you:

• Learn more about the Beacon code and how it works
• Learn the various methods available for adding the Beacon code to your website – use this information to decide which method is best for your organization

How it works

Once you install the Beacon code on your web properties, the Beacon will send page visit data to Act-On. We can connect page visits to your leads and contacts once their cookie ID is associated with an email address. Typically, browsers will save this identified cookie after your contact does one of the following:

• Clicks through an email message you've sent from Act-On
• Submits a form with their email address

The collected visit data will be available in your Website Prospector Report as well as within Segmentation, Contact and Account Report timelines, and elsewhere. This data allows you to answer many of the key questions at the core of marketing automation:

Who is visiting your website?

• Find out which companies are visiting your site before they ever fill out a form
• Use the Anonymous Visitors feature to target likely prospects at those companies
• Learn the referring domains and marketing campaigns that drove traffic to your site

What are they looking for?

• See the pages and content each prospect is viewing, as well as the search terms they're using while on your website – all in real-time
• Analyze which content types and topics deliver the biggest payoff, then optimize your website to capitalize on this knowledge
• Segment your lists based on what your prospects are interested in and target relevant messages based on these interests

Who are your qualified leads?

• Score your prospects so sales can focus on leads who are more ready to buy
• Generate higher quality prospects through behavior-aware drip programs
• Know what a specific prospect is interested in based on their activity history
• Alert sales immediately when key buying signals are detected

The Beacon is compliant with international privacy regulations and compatible with advanced website management tools like Google Tag Manager. It loads asynchronously, which means that it does not slow down the performance of your pages. The Beacon can also track multiple events on a single page, such as multiple clicks in a new window or tab.

Where to add the Beacon

Generally, you'll want to add the Beacon code to any web properties that you use to engage in marketing and sales activities. This includes your organization's main web domain, any subdomains such as blogs and whitepaper sites, and other web properties that your prospects and customers regularly visit, like your company's knowledge base or help center.

For best results, you should only install the Beacon code on web pages that pertain to your Act-On marketing activities. Installing the Beacon on multiple pages that are not part of your Act-On marketing strategy may cause slow performance for your account reports.

Ways to add the Beacon code

How you add the Beacon code to your site will depend on several factors:

• Which pages and domains you want to track in Act-On
• Which technology hosts your web domain
• Any other important factors you must consider (such as GDPR compliance)

Best Practice – Google Tag Manager

Generally, modern websites will have multiple third-party trackers running on their domain, and each tracker will need to set cookies and track personal data to provide complete functionality. This might include other web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, content optimization and experimentation tools like Optimizely, e-commerce plugins, and more. These all provide important data that allow you to understand how visitors use your website and to provide an increasingly customized and relevant experience for your audience.

However, in the post-GDPR era of informed digital consent, it's critical (and often required) to let your web visitors know about your data collection practices and privacy policy, in addition to giving them an opportunity to opt-in to tracking. Google Tag Manager is a helpful solution, because it allows you and your site visitors to manage all of these third-party tracking cookies in one place.

Want to use the Act-On Beacon with Google Tag Manager? Follow our guide to add the Act-On Beacon code to a Google Tag Manager container.

To take this further and create a customized cookie consent banner for your website, see our guide to building a custom banner.

Simplest Method – Add the Beacon code to your website footer

Depending on how your site is hosted, you can also add the beacon code directly to your website. We recommend placing it in the footer of the page and before the ending </body> tag.

For full instructions on accessing and adding the Beacon code to your website, see Add the Beacon Code to Your Website to Track Visitors.

WordPress Hosting – Add the Beacon code to your WordPress site

If your site runs on WordPress, you'll want to either use the above Google Tag Manager implementation or add the code directly to your WordPress site. For additional help, see Adding Beacon Tracking Code to WordPress.

Content Security Policy in Beacon Code

Prevent untrusted code from being run in the Beacon Code using a content security policy (CSP) and a signature to prove the script hasn't been modified. See Content Security Policy in Beacon Code.

Next Steps

After you have set up the Beacon code to track visits to your website, you can go to Settings > Other Settings > Beacon to check our validation and confirm that we are tracking data.

Once your site's Beacon is tracking data, you can:

• Begin using the Website Prospector report
• Set alerts for your Sales Team 
• Build lead scores based on specific page views
• Build segments based on web traffic behaviors