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Anonymous activity

People you don’t know visit your website and use your app. By tracking the things anonymous people do, you can better understand people’s behavior before they sign up or login. When you identify anonymous people, we’ll associate their anonymous activity with the identified person, so you have a complete history of their activity—triggering campaigns, adding people to segments, and so on.

How it works

When a person visits your site or app, they get an anonymous_id. You can track events against this ID—the pages they visit, things they click, and so on.

For the most part, this activity isn’t very useful by itself. But when you identify people, we’ll merge people’s anonymous activity with their profiles, so you can respond to the things people did before you identified them! That’s where anonymous activity really shines.

You can use anonymous activity to:

• Trigger anonymous in-app messages encouraging people to sign up, make a purchase, log in, etc
• Personalize and trigger messages after you identify people—like onboarding campaigns based on things people did before they signed up for your service
• Keep metrics on things like page and screen views via destinationsA destination is a place that you want to send data from one or more sources to. You can use your own workspace as a destination; send data to another service; or send data to your data warehouse. like Mixpanel, Amplitude, etc

Anonymous pageviews

The page and screen methods represent pages that people view on your website or in your app. Page and screen events aren’t very specific; they simply track traffic, but they can be useful for understanding how people move through your site or app. You can send these events to analytics platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and so on to measure traffic. When you identify people, you might use their anonymous pageviews to invite them to buy a product or sign up for a class based on the pages they viewed.

Anonymous pageviews can also trigger in-app messages! You can use page rules to show anonymous visitors in-app messages when they visit specific pages in your app.

• JavaScript client SDKs: we’ll automatically capture page events for each page the visitor views
• Mobile SDKs: you can automatically capture screen events—like pageviews, but for screens in your mobile app
• Server-side libraries (Node.JS, Python, and Go): you’ll need to capture page events yourself.

Anonymous events

Where page events are specialized for pageviews specifically, you can also track custom events. These events can be whatever you want. Where a page event might tell you when a person visits a product page, you could also track when a person adds that product to their cart—along with the price of the item, the quantity, department, and so on.

Unlike page and screen views, custom events aren’t captured automatically, and are less meaningful until you identify a person. But, because custom events typically carry more specific information about things people do, these events can help you trigger much more powerful and personalized campaigns when you eventually identify a person.

Anonymous events in the Activity log

The activity log shows Identified and Anonymous events. Identified events are events associated with a person in your workspace. Anonymous events are associated with an unknown (or anonymous) person. While we capture anonymous events, these events don’t do anything until you associate (or merge) them with a person.

When events are merged to a person’s profile, they become “identified” and appear in the Identified tab. Events with a icon next to the person, were previously anonymous events that are now associated with a person.

We’ll also report an Anonymous merge activity in the log when we merge anonymous events with a person.