Active Campaign Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager

[@MeasureSchool]

🔔🔔 THERE IS A NEW UPDATED VERSION OF THIS VIDEO 🔔🔔 👇 Check it out here 👇 ActiveCampaign Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager: kzbin.info/aero/PLg...

[@Rob-hh5wh]

This link doesn't work

[@mihaiiliescu3862]

link doesn't work

[@ContentSnare]

Total freaking lifesaver. Or at least a 2 hour saver. In the middle of writing a PHP script when I found this gem of a video. Thanks!

[@giacomogalanti7079]

fantastic, I also implemented the tracking of internal links, buttons, timer session and now I start the automation in a simple way :) Thank's

[@brandoncjgrimes]

Hi ! How did you create an email variable for the user?

[@JustinBrooke]

AMAZEBALLS!!! This is why I tell people ActiveCampaign beats almost every other email tool. Julian knows, Julian is king!

[@MeasureSchool]

haha.... thanks Justin.

[@_michaelwalker]

is it possible to do this with an ActiveCampaign Contact ID instead of their email address?

[@bobyd44]

Hi Julian. Can you think at any reason why your code may not work? Has AC changed something since? I tried many times and I implemented every bit as you explain, but it returns not a spawned message. Just success 0, an ID account must be provided. Thank you

[@bobyd44]

I got it. It dose not work on lite. It must be a plus plan at least.

[@PhilippeLarcher]

@@bobyd44 oh! Any source on this?

[@markmottershead646]

Hu Julian, you very kindly helped me yesterday, thanks. If someone opts in to AC on the previous page (via a 3rd party optin form), how would one get the email address to carry over? The Thomas Geiger plugin only inserts the logged-in user into the data layer. Thanks again.

[@tommuseth9601]

Hi Julian. Thanks for the video. I got a bit lost around 9 mins when you talked about a plugin for capturing emails and populating the vistorEmail variable - could you tell me what the plugin is?

[@MeasureSchool]

depends on your system. In wordpress you could use the Google Tag Manager for Wordpress plugin to expose the email address of the user who is logged in.

[@MichaelMontefusco]

Hey Julian! This is great. My only question is are you taking the web app from the script you wrote and embedding on the website somehow so it fires when someone does something on the actual site? I must have missed that part

[@CarlosMoraesCom]

Thanks a lot!!! 2:47 Why not using both site and event tracking at the same time??

[@MeasureSchool]

you can do that, but it's a complete different tracking

[@CarlosMoraesCom]

@@MeasureSchool , thanks. got it.

[@sarahmiko895]

Hi ! Thank you so much for this video 🙂 I’m trying to send to send multiple data via eventdata, is it possible ? I would like to send order detail after a bought action, so I try to send my dataLayer eventdata={{order}} My datalayer “order” has many info (sku, price, quantity), all is well interpreted in the message of GTM (like a table [ { sku : xxxx, price : xxxx} ]) but Active Campaign interprets the infos this way : [object Object] Can you help me ?

[@TomaszTomczuk]

Hi Jordan, I done the some steps using this strategy by my automation in Active Campaign contains two steps that belong to Google Analytics Ecommerce Enhance Checkout Behaviour Analysis. How can I transfer data that the email was open and the link inside that email was clicked to Google Analytics?

[@MeasureSchool]

I don't think there is a way to transfer the data directly. What you could do is use UTM parameters, which would track the clicks that go back to your website

[@Nezhyka5]

Thank you, Julian. You saved me. Again. :) However I did encounter one problem with purchase event. I used dynamic data GA4 Purchesed Items but it doesn't work. In Active Campaign there is only Purchase event with no data about the product. Any idea, why is that so? I would appreciate some help. :)

[@lucasantonini7618]

Hi Julian! You are doing a great job! I didn't find anywhere else some explanation about this topic. I just have one question: in cases that the people who visit my Landing Page don't need to log in in their account, how could I track those people? Because I won't have their e-mail to connect them to their contact data on Active Campaign. Thanks a lot for your teachings!

[@MeasureSchool]

not possible. You need to have the user information to connect him to the AC profile. You could also use the Hash or Contact ID, but that would require extra setup

[@guidoparodi956]

Hello Julian, your tutorial are great! The script returns me an error: "An account ID must be provided". I don't know if it could be useful, but my Event tracking API window in AC says :"actid This must always be xxxxx (required)", and so it isn't just a number. Many thanks for your help!

[@CoreyHydeDLShirts]

Did you ever get this figured out? I get the same error everything in the code looks right

[@CoreyHydeDLShirts]

Hi Julian, love the GTM videos I even took one of your courses on Udemy and it helped tremendously! I'm having an issue with this script, it doesn't seem to be accepting or posting the account id so when I test I get {"success":0,"message":"An account ID must be provided."}

[@BenJackGill]

This video tutorial is pure gold, and it has helped me setup Active Campaign Event Tracking. But there is one last problem I can't solve... I really want to be able to track events if the user visits my site through an email link, not only if they submit a form. Users who submit a form will have their site tracking and event tracking firing correctly thanks to your awesome setup explained on this video. But users who visit my page through an email link will only have site tracking - this is because your event tracking will not fire if we do not have an email address to send. Since Active Campaign site tracking is able to identify the user (and therefore identify their email address) is it possible to send that information to Active Campaign through the Event Tracking API? This way users will have event tracking if they submit a form AND if they visit through an email link.

[@BenJackGill]

For example, does the site tracking provide a contact hash that we can use to lookup their email? If so, this could be used to find out the users email: www.activecampaign.com/api/example.php?call=contact_view_hash But I'm an amateur coder so I'm not sure how to implement it or if its even possible.

[@MeasureSchool]

you are correct. Unfortunately the Site Tracking doesn't expose the email add, so we can't use that (I have asked the support). But what you could do is to include the User Email add in the actual link with a query parameter (e.g. link.com/?email=%EMAIL%) and then pick that up on the Landingpage and store it in a cookie - I actually do the same in this videokzbin.info/www/bejne/sGOTeGyEptWbj7s - Then you would have the email available when you want to send the Event. Just pull it out of the cookie (via a 1st party cookie variable).

[@BenJackGill]

Sounds like a good solution. But have you ever run into any problems with always exposing the users email like that?

[@MeasureSchool]

yes, actually it's against the TOS of Google Analytics to send in the email address. Since GA tracks pageviews and the URL automatically, it would show up in GA, so you need to make sure to strip that out of the URL before you send it to GA www.simoahava.com/gtm-tips/remove-pii-google-analytics-hits/

[@BenJackGill]

Amazing thank you and merry christmas!

[@DJMelena]

Thanks for all the awesome content man. Question.... If I wanted to pass a GTM variable to ActiveCampaign as a custom hidden field, how can I have active campaign pull that variable in? Any videos that cover this?

[@MeasureSchool]

hidden form field. We have videos on that

[@DJMelena]

@@MeasureSchool I was able to find a video in Measure Masters that covered it!! Super stoked to be able to use a single form and have the Event Title pass through dynamically depending on which page the user signs up on.

[@frede1987]

Hi! Is there any way for the Google Script to use as parameter the AC contact ID instead of email address? Thanks!

[@MeasureSchool]

not unless you lookup the email address through the AC contact ID first (so that would be 2 API requests).

[@yuyekbryan]

thanks Julian. I've deployed as web ap and the script is taking forever. it says "Fetching data..." Any tips?

[@MeasureSchool]

no, no tips

[@yuyekbryan]

@@MeasureSchool managed to solved this. Didn't follow yout instructions on "make a copy" my bad. Thanks for replying still 😂

[@DeeDellimore]

It's not working for me :(. The script doesn't work. I get success: 0 message: An event must be provided. What am I doing wrong?

[@TheFreedomMarketer]

Have you got a lesson for tracking Google Ads and ActiveCampaigns chat bot (known as conversations) so to see if any ads triggered a conversation on the chat please. Thanks

[@se1ectmedia]

Say I want to track a button link click on the website to pass the information back like you showed but they aren't logged in. I see how you did it and how it could work if it was say a WooCommerce website they were logged in but these people will not be logged in and still want to get the info tracked back to their individual email within AC. Is this possible?

[@MeasureSchool]

yes, but you need the email. You can capture it when they fill out a form or they just came from an email and you encoded the information in the link they clicked

[@michaelbeesley2955]

Thanks for the great video! Do you have any knowledge or work-arounds to track events defined by tag manager within Autopilot?

[@marlonuc]

Hi Julian great video, I've implemented in my site (is a SPA) it's working nice in Desktop but it seems to crash in mobile (devices), do you know if this is normal or this is some workaround to fix it?

[@MeasureSchool]

Usually it should work on mobile too. But it's not so easy to debug on mobile. you need to follow the tutorials developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/remote-debugging/ to set up, and debug from there. Hope you can find which step is not working on mobile.

[@andrewmcbride88]

Active Campaign is pretty amazing. Your videos are very helpful and easy for beginners. I would love to see any other tips you have for AC; like automations that you use etc. Thank you.

[@MeasureSchool]

cool. Was thinking about doing something like it

[@andonidharma]

Love your help! But how would you do with video watching tracking? I got a bit lost with that... Thanks in advance!

[@MeasureSchool]

essentially you can install video tracking from LunaMetrics here www.lunametrics.com/labs/recipes/ and instead of using the Trigger for Google Analytics, use it for your AC Event Tracking tag

[@andreijach3042]

@@MeasureSchool Hi Julian, would you still use the custom image tag for video and other events, as the tag is firing in preview and debug, but not coming into AC?

[@MrBVideoChannel]

Great...Thank you...Our users so not login, but are tracked from the AC Tracking code. Is there a way to have the email id use the AC tracking code (which identifies the user) to input to the Event 2AC script? Else you are saying that the email address needs to go into a data layer when people optin to a form. Just one more step to making this work for me. Thanks

[@MeasureSchool]

no... the AC Tracking code doesn't expose any information (I've tried and asked the support to). You need to build your own identification method

[@CarlosMoraesCom]

Hey, and what about the method for filling out the data layer with the email info? You've mentioned a plugin but didn't show how to get this part done. This is the only missing piece in the whole tutorial :)

[@ToanLeDiepTrong]

Same problem, I do all the things but do not know how to get email info. I do not have Message in preview mode to get the right variable. Anyone helps?

[@chrisariasnow]

What's the advantage of plugging AC Event Tracking into Google Tag Manager rather than directly on the website's footer code? While this video is informative (thank you) this appears to be a more advanced implementation. Why is this way better?

[@MeasureSchool]

you may be confusing Event Tracking with Site Tracking. Event Tracking is usually something you do on interactions, not on a pageview.

[@chrisariasnow]

@@MeasureSchool I think you're right.

[@elijahjohnyarra]

Does it work together with Facebook Pixel using GTM? Cause I think if you have 2 tracking pixel in your footer it will be contradicted

[@MeasureSchool]

this has nothing to do with the FB pixel. It will not interfere, if you have it installed correctly

[@elijahjohnyarra]

I copied what you did in this video but IN active Campaign it doesn't show the report of the EVENT TRACKING but it shows success on the Google Script you gave us. How to troubleshoot?

[@BenJackGill]

This is great, and I have everything setup and working. But what if we want to use the logged in users email (from the data layer) and then if that is not available use the email stored in the cookie? Your setup only allows for using one variable in the URL string for the email. So we can only do one or the other. But we need a way of saying "use the datalayer email variable if it is available, otherwise use the cookie email variable"... any ideas how to do that?

[@MeasureSchool]

you could do it in a custom javascript variable or lookup table variable

[@BenJackGill]

Wow thanks for the fast reply! A lookup table variable sounds more to my ability. Do you have any advice for how it would be setup?

[@BenJackGill]

Ok I figured it out incase other people are interested: 1) Create a variable for the "logged in" email as per thee video which is present in the datalayer (example: {{dlv - email}} ) 2) Create a variable for email stored as a cookie (example: {{cookie - email}} ) you will need to follow his other videos to learn how to do this one, you can find links to these videos in the video description 3) Create a Custom JavaScript variable (example: {{dlv or cookie - email}} ) using the code provided below. If you use different names for the variables from steps 1 and 2 you will need to update the code: function() { if( "{{dlv - email}}" ) { return "{{dlv - email}}"; } else { return "{{cookie - email}}"; } } 4) Use your new Custom Javascript Variable {{dlv or cookie - email}} you just created inside the URL string as shown in the video If thee user is logged in it will use that email, if the user is not logged in it will check to see if a cookie email is present, and if not cookie email is present nothing will happen.

[@brandoncjgrimes]

Hi Benjamin! By any chance could you help. I'm trying to understand how to create a variable for a stored email. Either i'm not doing it right, or the theme i'm using (Divi) is not letting me create it! ughhh

[@AndresLiebrecht]

How you can get the Email when somebody enters the website trough a newsletter? So I can measure if they do something after opening the email

[@MeasureSchool]

only if you encode it in the url link

[@AntonioRillera]

Thanks for this, it seems like the script resource no longer works. Do you have an alternative?

[@MeasureSchool]

why does it seem to work? Works fine for me

[@pilarferre4411]

Great as always! Thank you for all the training you provide : )

[@ByronTrzeciak]

Hey Julian, how do I track successful form submissions using Active Campaign - is there a video this? I believe AC uses javascript or Ajax for validating form submission and that way the standard GTM validation is not working and if you switch it off it means that it will fire an event even when the form doesn't submit successfully. Would love some help.

[@MeasureSchool]

easiest would be to configure AC to redirect the user to a thank you page after he signed up and then track that.

[@ByronTrzeciak]

Thanks Julian for the quick response. That's the approach I thought as well, I've got use to event tracking and prefer it however where the goal is tracked on the page were the event actually occurs, rather than the thank you page, I just feel it's cleaner in Google Analytics. Do you know of any scripts to track the form validation, I know there are some good scripts out there for Ajax but it doesn't appear that AC uses Ajax for their forms.

[@MeasureSchool]

I'm not sure how the form by AC is coded, my guess it's not standard and therefore the trigger doesn't work. If you can tap into the form validation you could build your own Listener. I'm not aware of any standard solution that would easily accomplish this.

[@ByronTrzeciak]

Thank you Julian, much appreciated for your time!

[@hayendang2494]

I'm Setting Up my shopify store, I have integration of active campaign. Could you do a tutorial video how to do event tracking of shopify store directly from active campaign? Do you think it's easier that way or the tutorial above is easier for non coding experience people like me ?

[@hoangdang5617]

Hoang Dang never mind, your way is a lot easier. Thanks Julian

[@laurahoussain]

Hi, there. is there to use the ActiveCampaign user ID instead of the email address? Thanks for you awesome video.;).

[@MeasureSchool]

no

[@refrigerationtechnologies]

My website does not have a user login so how can i assign an event to a user when they arrive at my site? This "user" will already be part of my AC account and i will have their IP address.

[@ramina.8901]

I have the same question. It would be nice if someone could help :)

[@miralinda6545]

Hey, thanks for the video!!

[@MeasureSchool]

No problem!

[@mitchellalomar]

Is it possible to capture the event tracking data when a visitor views a image? Can you push cache for image tag?

[@MeasureSchool]

no, not directly. There are workarounds though

[@ShawnParry]

Awesome! I've been looking for a way to do this, when I click the link to get the script it takes me a "page not found" do you happen to have the updated URL?

[@chrissowerby69]

how would i get the email out of the link the user clicks from the email into the datalayer? do you have a vid for that? thanks.

[@MeasureSchool]

no, I don't have a video for this (yet). What you would need to do is attach the Email address to the link in the email as a query parameter (e.g link: measureschool.com/email=[e-mail]) Then you could build URL variable that pulls out the email - This way you would have it available as a Variable in GTM and could plug it into the script But if you don't fire the script on the same page the value would be gone once the user navigates to the next page. You could save it in a cookie to have it available later.

[@chrissowerby69]

ok thanks. so if i saved it into a datalayer variable it would not persist when the page reloads? i ajax in my pages without page reload so perhaps it sill persist in this case untill the tab is closed. Thanks

[@MeasureSchool]

just a reminder: If you use this method and GA is installed as well, make sure you filter out the email address from the URL when sending the data to GA. This is PII and is not allowed to be sent into GA www.simoahava.com/analytics/remove-email-addresses-from-url-parameters/

[@guyrob1687]

Hi, when I'm pushing an email from the data layer to the image, the '@' gets changed to '%40' and is therefore not being picked up by Active Campaign. Is there another way to send this URL to make the format persist?

[@MeasureSchool]

%40 should be correct, because you'd need a URL encoded string. I'd encourage you to test with a hardcoded value. If you really wanted to change it you could look into the urlecoding methods for javascript and run your value through a custom variable

[@guyrob1687]

@@MeasureSchool Yes you were right. The issue was the GTM Custom Image, my site configuration didn't let it load. I've just created a custom HTML way to ping the site via an IMG and it works

[@brandoncjgrimes]

Hi Julian! Great videos! I've been following you for a while. I've been searching the internet and your youtube videos all day. I can't seem to find how to create a variable for stored email data. Any where around I can find the answer?

[@MeasureSchool]

you would need to first of all send the data to the website (that's something you do through the query string) and then you can pick it up with a url variable

[@raofreak]

Great as always!!

[@Shaxmax2]

Hi Julian, I followed the link you provided but unfortunatly the measureschool redirect leads me to an error message by google: "Sorry, unable to open the file at this time. - Please check the address and try again." Can u help?

[@MeasureSchool]

thanks for letting me know. should be working again

[@Shaxmax2]

Hi Julian, I just tried it again, but it still doesn't work. After the fetching screen, I still get the error: "Sorry, unable to open the file at this time. - Please check the address and try again." :-(

[@harshthehappiest]

How do we track people who do not sign up and come from different sources and contacts that are added manually? Please help.

[@MeasureSchool]

if you don't have the email you can't identify them in the system. There is no way

[@elijahjohnyarra]

Also is this still available in 2019 and beyond?

[@MeasureSchool]

2019yes, beyond... who knows

[@cathysteelandt5357]

Can you do this with Campaign Monitor?

[@MeasureSchool]

I'm not very familiar with CampaignMonitor, but from my short resource they don't offer Event Tracking?

[@ivanrudyi9606]

Hello Jordan I added the javascript code, registered the parameters to connect to the AK, but when the script is executed, the event is not sent ((( {"Success": 0, "message": "An event must be provided."} TypeError: Can not read the "parameter" property of the undefined object. (Line 27, file Code) - jmp.sh/BJFMOYg Please tell me why this can happen. Thanks in advance!

[@carlosfajardor281]

Request failed for trackcmp.net returned code 504. Truncated server response: 504 Gateway Time-out 504 Gateway Time-out (use muteHttpExceptions option to examine full response) (línea 50, archivo "Code", proyecto "Copia de [Measureschool] Event2AC Script") I get this error when I want to check AC event tracking

[@atulsethi4893]

I followed the video it give me success message of event submission but when i am checking contacts it doesnt show anything can you please help

[@MeasureSchool]

are you sure the email is in the call too?

[@rubening]

@@MeasureSchool the same thing has been happening to me. Your video is easy to follow and I'm pretty sure I have everything set up just how you say to, but the contact doesn't pop up. If I try it with an existing contact there is no update on the recent activity feed. Can you verify that this is still working for you? Thanks for all the great GTM help!

[@matteozambon]

Very good tips script.google.com. I've used a external PHP file. Good job!

[@patchet]

Confused... I get the {"success":1,"message":"Event spawned"} message but no event recorded for the test contact I'm using.

[@MeasureSchool]

yea, that's odd. You might need to ask the AC team about it

[@patchet]

I did. And they launched a test event on their side (not using this script) and it logged successfully for that contact - I'll run through this again with a different contact and see if it works. Thx!

[@GabrielRavarini]

Interesting... can you do the same with Mailchimp?

[@MeasureSchool]

I don't think Mailchimp provides an Event Tracking API, but I might be mistaken?

[@gabrielnogueras4514]

is this script still supported?

[@MeasureSchool]

yes

[@thefryingpan951]

how can i make it so that I will receive an update from every user I have in my active campaign contact list? lets saky i have 10k in there? i don't want to have to d this 10k times xD

[@MeasureSchool]

I don't understand

[@matthewmiao1728]

looks like now you don't need to pre set the event in the Active Campaign backend.....

[@MeasureSchool]

oh really? cool... I need to check that out

[@alexandrosfar]

Hey Julian, your training videos are awesome and you always provide great value. And thank you for that! I'm a bit stuck with this process at the point where you identify the key for the data layer variable name: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mH_Om6Clj752f7cm41s Thanks in advance

[@ToanLeDiepTrong]

same problem with me, do you have any solution?

[@dddcemddd]

You are doing this so you don't have to expose your API key. But you expose a script that has your api key and anyone can use that script to send data to your API. How's this useful? Am I missing something?

[@MeasureSchool]

on the client side I only call a URL and pass in Event Data. This could theocratically be read by anyone, but in this call I'm not exposing my API key. That is something I store in the App Script which should only be accessible to you