The following are the most commonly asked questions related to the data collection scripts.
Absolutely. Emarsys holds the ISO 27001 certificate and uses the highest encryption standards for data transfer. Furthermore, the data collected on your web shop is used to create statistical models for your account only, and does not contribute to any central model.
Product catalogs need to contain the data prescribed in our guidelines. We support both our own .csv format and the Google Product Feed format, but you will need to ask Emarsys Support to enable GPF.
FTP and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS) are supported; these must start with ftp://. SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is currently not supported.
Your product catalog should only contain product information that is anyway publicly available on your website. Even so, the data collection scripts support fetching password-protected catalog files on secure URLs. A standard URL for a password-protected file should look something like this: https://username:password@server.foo.com/catalog.csv
Yes. Since we track non-identified visitors with a persistent cookie, we can keep all information from that device and connect it to a customer ID as soon as they use the same device to log in to the website or click a trackable link leading to it from an Emarsys email. The cookie will of course collect all visitor data, and will not differentiate between actual visitors if more than one person is using that device. The cookie will also only keep data for as long as it is active (cookies have a rolling 1-year lifetime from the last website visit).
The scripts update a special set of fields in the Emarsys database with the latest browse, purchase and abandon actions on your website. Click here for a list of these fields. Click here for some suggestions on how to use them to enhance your day-to-day marketing campaigns.
The data collection scripts provide category information in three ways:
- Top categories (most interested products throughout the last week)
- Last session categories (categories seen in the last session)
- All categories ever purchased, etc.
You should experiment with the category column you use in different scenarios. For example, Last-session categories is good way to express short-term interest, whereas All categories ever purchased is better for long-term trends.
In response to customer feedback, Emarsys version 8.3 made some of the data collected by the scripts available for revenue reports on the Trends and Campaign Reporting pages. These reports only relate to campaigns launched after this release (in June, 2015).
Yes, it is. We are aware that many site optimization tools recommend minimizing JS elements, therefore we have minimized our scripts.