The Challenge: Returning Customers Show up as New Users

Marketing destinations like Facebook & Klaviyo rely on cookies to identify customers on your website. But browser, iOS, & cookie restrictions are making it harder for destinations to correctly identify returning users. So these returning customers are showing up as anonymous.

Example:

• Customer Susie visits your website & signs up for email. Klaviyo cookies & creates a profile for her.
  7 days later, her Klaviyo cookie expires.
• The next day (8 days since her first visit), she visits your website again, adds an item to her cart, but doesn't purchase.
• You should be able to send a cart abandonment email to her. But because the Klaviyo cookie expired, Klaviyo sees her as a new anonymous user. And you miss out on that sale.

The Solution: Elevar's Session Enrichment 

What would sending 10-30% more cart abandonment emails do for your business?

That's the percentage of extra identifiable events we've seen Elevar send with our customer identity tracking solution: Session Enrichment.

Elevar uses a 1-year server-set cookie to identify returning users. It is not affected by the restrictions that affect browser cookies. So in the example above, when Klaviyo wasn't able to identify Customer Susie added a product to her cart, Elevar is. [Learn More]

Session Enrichment and Extending Attribution

In addition to storing user identifier information, Session Enrichment also stores attribution information like click IDs, UTMs, & referrers.

This means that you send more attributable conversions to your destinations.

Most Click IDs get stored as browser-set cookies in the user's browser. This means they must also adhere to browser restrictions. So even if the browser-set attribution expires after 24 hours or 7 days, Elevar still retains that attribution information and sends it to your server-side destinations. This also helps reduce direct traffic in GA4's event-scoped Source / Medium values. [Does not affect session-scoped or first-user-scoped attribution]

Note: You can control your Attribution Window in your destination, so old campaigns won't be attributed to recent sales.

How to Benefit from Session Enrichment

Learn how to maximize your benefit from Elevar's user identity tracking feature.

Make Sure Session Enrichment in Enabled

On my My Tracking page, make sure the Session Enrichment Source is enabled. When enabled Session Enrichment allows Elevar to listen for email signups, SMS singups, user logins, and checkout events connect those email addresses and phone numbers to a unique user id for identity tracking, and send future server events with that email address and phone number for that user.

Ensure that Email Signup Tracking is Firing

If you're on data layer version 3.4+ or our Shopify Soure and using a Klaviyo pop-up, Attentive pop-up, Postscript pop-up, or the Native Shopify Footer for email capture, you're good here!

To ensure this is working to it's fullest, test signing up for your marketing emails on your website. After you sign up, if you see a dl_subscribe event being sent to Elevar in your developer console's network tab, then you know it's working:

Using a different pop-up software provider? We'd love to integrate with them - but we need their buy-in (which you can influence!). Ask your email signup software provider to connect with Elevar's Product team by emailing [email protected] to learn about Elevar's integration requirements.

In the meantime, your development team can build a dl_subscribe event following our schema.

Migrate Your Tracking Server-Side

Check out the list of available Destinations in the My Tracking of your Elevar App.

Session is enriched when pass events to your server-side destinations. Using the server-side destination when available for your marketing channel will get you the most benefit from session enrichment.

Are you using any of these marketing channels? If yes, set up the destinations in Elevar [available integrations] + [remove your previous tracking] !

Consider with some marketing channels like Klaviyo where events can only be passed when you have an email address. Visitors may return to you site multiple times after the initial signup and not re-enter their email. With session enrichment we have that email available for the subsequent visits and are not able to pass that information to Klaviyo that was not previously available. Set up the Klaviyo destination & split test the client vs server-side tracking to see the wins for yourself! [Instructions]

Customer Data Deletion Request

If you get a request from a customer to delete their data, follow these steps to delete that shopper from Elevar's Session Enrichment.

Consent & Session Enrichment

If you'd like to have Session Enrichment wait to collect users data until the shopper consents to specific consent categories, follow these steps to set up Consent Mode in Session Enrichment.