Ontraport follows each visitor's journey with you, from the first click to the sale. That shows you which campaigns actually bring in customers. It also lets your pages show each visitor content that fits them. In this lesson, you'll see how tracking works and what it needs.
Tracking runs on cookies. A cookie is a small text file a website stores in a visitor's browser. Websites use them to remember things between visits, like what's in your shopping cart or that you're logged in. Ontraport recognizes your visitors with its own cookie.
Running targeted ads has gotten harder as Apple and Google change the way people's online activity is tracked. Ontraport tracks your leads throughout their journey with you, so you don't have to rely on third-party data to see what's working. And you can share it. With Deep Funnel Conversion Tracking, available on Pro and above, your forms capture Facebook and Google click IDs when they're submitted, so you can send conversions back to those platforms. The Facebook part also needs the Facebook pixel on your pages. The Deep funnel conversions lesson shows you how.
Tracking needs two things. First, capture your leads and sales with Ontraport forms. Second, put the Ontraport tracking script on every page of your site. Ontraport Pages include the script automatically. For WordPress and other sites, see the lesson on adding the tracking script.
Let's follow one visitor. On their first visit, they're anonymous. Ontraport doesn't know who they are yet. Say they arrived by clicking a UTM link in one of your ads. When they opt in, that link is credited as their first click, in the Lead Information section of their contact record. So you can see which campaign brought them in. Each time they come back through a link with UTM values, the last-click values are replaced with that visit's. UTM tracking is available on Pro and above.
If you run a partner program, Ontraport uses a cookie to remember which partner referred them. When they opt in or buy, that partner is saved in the First referrer and Last referrer fields.
When they fill out your form, they become a contact, and their browser gets the Ontraport cookie. Now they're an identified visitor. Their visits to your pages show up in the contact log on their record, along with the forms they've filled out and the emails you've sent them.
A contact also gets cookied when they click a link in one of your emails, log in to a membership site, or click a tracked link. If they clear their cookies, or visit in a browser that was never cookied, they look anonymous again until one of those things happens.
Cookie identification is great for personalization, but it isn't proof of who's at the keyboard. The most reliable way to identify a contact is a membership site login. That's the third level: logged-in members. So use identified visitors for low-risk content, where a wrong guess does no harm. Save anything private, like purchase history or account details, for logged-in members.
In Ontraport Pages, these three levels control who sees what. In a block's display settings, Display this block to whom lets you show it to everyone, to anonymous visitors, to identified visitors, or to logged-in members, and narrow it further with conditions.
You can restrict a whole page the same way, in the page's Display Settings. For example, show it only to logged-in members.
So: Ontraport recognizes visitors with a cookie, as they go from anonymous, to identified, to logged in. Use Ontraport forms, keep the tracking script on every page, and match what you show to how sure you are of who's visiting. Next up: tracked links, which let you trigger actions when your cookied contacts click a link, nearly anywhere online.