Visitor Group Tracking into Episerver Insight

In August Chris Sharp wrote about the newly released top-level filter for Visitor Groups in Episerver Insight (link to blog). To make use of this filter it requires additional tracking into the Profile Store (underlying datastore for Episerver Insight) with the visitor group information. This blog will show an example of how to track Visitor Groups into Profile Store with similar syntax to the standard [PageViewTracking] attribute on the controller action method, that is included in EPiServer.Tracking.PageView. This content was presented at Episerver Ascend in London.

In order to get started, we need to install the following packages (full documentation here)

• EPiServer.Tracking.Core. Generic package for all tracking.
• EPiServer.Tracking.Cms. Base classes for tracking of CMS data.

For a complete tracking of your website, I would also recommend installing the pageview and commerce tracking

• EPiServer.Tracking.PageView. Native integration for tracking of CMS data.
• EPiServer.Tracking.Commerce. Native integration for tracking of Commerce data.

To follow the [PageViewTracking] notation I have created a custom [VisitorGroupTracking] that does the following:

1. Make sure we're not in Edit mode
2. Get all visitor groups
3. Check which visitor groups the principal is a member of
   • I will track both member and non-member
4. Create a tracking event
5. Send tracking data

Complete source code can be found here.

There was a good discussion at the event around performance, and how often a visitor group should be tracked, and as always I believe that it's worth considering the use case for the tracked visitor group and design the tracking to conform to that. Also, it's a good idea to make sure the tracking isn't affecting your websites customer experience (performance) negatively.

Feel free to provide ideas or comments below, especially if you already have strategies around Visitor Group Tracking.