Once you have implemented the Data Collection scripts, you can easily check if the scripts are working correctly by opening the Live Events page from the Data Sources page.
The Live Events page shows the last 10 events identified on your web shop by the scripts. This is refreshed every time you open the page or click the Refresh button.
To validate your data collection scripts, you just need to go to the web shop and perform the kind of actions that you want to capture from your visitors. Then go back to Emarsys and check that these have been correctly picked up by the Data Collection scripts. If not, please contact Emarsys Support so that Emarsys can check your implementation for errors.
You can filter for different events in the Showing drop-down, and exclude real visitor events by selecting my visit in the second drop-down.
On the Live Events page, times and dates are always reported in UTC, and not in your account time zone.
Example
To validate the View event, click an item in your web shop and check that this item is showing under view events with the following information:
- Time and date of view.
- Customer identifier (usually an email hash, and only if the visitor has been identified).
- Item thumbnail.
Notes:
- The code under the date and time refers to the Data Collection scripts cookie and can be ignored.
- If you are using A/B testing, you will also see the Cohort used for this recommendation.
- The lightning bolt indicates that the item was viewed after clicking a tracked link in an email campaign.
Click the thumbnail to go to the Product Info page, where you can see the item ID, category, price and availability as defined in your product data, as well as the items currently recommended by the Related and Also Bought widgets. Clicking the item link or image will take you back to the web page where you originally viewed it.
You can then repeat this process for all the other events that you want to track:
- clicks
- carts
- non-empty carts
- purchases
- category views
- searches
- keywords
- tags
- recommendations
- identified
- errors
Once you have validated all the events you are using, you must wait until the Data Collection scripts have collected enough data to enable Predict to make meaningful recommendations. Once your installation of Predict has been activated and is working in a live environment, you can continue to check it using the Live Validator page.
Identifying customers
Emarsys recommends to use the Email Hash identifier, as this also includes visitors who have registered but not yet made a purchase. If you are unable to use this for technical or other reasons, CustomerID can also be used.
Validating a multi-domain integration
If your web shop has multiple domains, you should see the localized feature names appear in the Live Events viewer (RELATED_UK, PERSONAL_UK, etc.).
You should also check that the addToCart and checkOut commands from your localized sites report the transaction value in the currency of your main site.