Introduction to tracking

What is tracking?

Tracking is the process of collecting data on user behavior on your website to understand how visitors interact with the content. This process is essential for personalizing their experience. At a high level, tracking involves:

• User identification – Assigning unique, anonymous identifiers to visitors to recognize them across sessions.
• Event capture – Recording specific actions users take, such as page views and clicks.
• Data transmission – Sending the collected interaction data to analytics servers for processing.
• Behavior analysis – Processing the data to understand user patterns and content preferences, which powers the recommendation engine.

How tracking works

The Content Recommendations system uses ip.js, a client-side JavaScript library that runs on your website. To ensure accurate tracking, the system performs the following steps:

1. Script execution – When a visitor accesses your site, the ip.js script executes in their browser. It places first-party cookies to identify the user and session, tracks the content viewed, and sends this interaction data to the analytics servers.
2. Data collection – The script automatically captures page view events, user engagement metrics, referrer information, and user identifiers (if provided).
3. Real-time processing – The system processes this data in real-time to generate user interest profiles.
4. Content import – Content scraping is a crucial part of this process. When a user views a page, the tracking event triggers the system to scrape and import the content from that URL. This ensures the recommendation engine has an up-to-date catalog of your content for analysis and recommendation. The system scrapes article text, titles, metadata, and media assets.