The Basics

Here are a few things that you need to know that are the foundation of FoxMetrics, understanding these fundamental concepts will allow you to unleash the true power and flexibility of the FoxMetrics platform.

Summary

At the heart of FoxMetrics are people, visits, events and attributes. Each unique person is tracked as an individual entity and for every visit that they make to your application is track as a unique visit. Each event is tied to a visit that and could contain one or more attributes.

People

Well, people are people - we believe that to really provide you with granular insights, we need to track and analyze data as its being used by the people that use your application. If you have a store, people visit your store and potentially buy from your store; therefore, we track it just as that. Our person-level tracking is very unique and significantly improves the granularity of the reports that we can provide.

Each person can have a profile with a id, the id of a person should be unique, therefore, we strongly suggest that if you already have a unique id such as a customer id or email address, user name, Facebook id, etc. then you should let us know what it is, otherwise, FoxMetrics will generate a random id for that person and use it as its unique person id.

Here is a quick example of how you can build a profile to identify a person by specifying a unique id, a first name of John and last name of Doe.

                        <script type="text/javascript">

                        _fxm.events.push(['setPerson', { id: 'john.doe@email.com', firstName: 'John', lastName: 'Doe'}]);

                        </script>

For more details, please see our API’s page.

Visits

A visit is defined as a series of actions from the same uniquely identified person with a time of no more than 30 minutes (customizable) between each action. The visit ends when 30 minutes elapse between actions. If someone leaves your site, and then returns within 30 minutes, this will count as the same visit otherwise, it’s a new visit.

Events

Events are actions that are performed by the people that visit or use your application. In FoxMetrics, you will be able to see these events in near real-time as they occur. An event could be a Subscription Page View, Register Button Clicked, Subscribed to Newsletter, etc. The events that you specify should be meaningful to your business and actionable. Each event could have as many attributes as you see fit.

You can create events in two ways, 1) Using the event library from within your dashboard once you log in 2) Using one of our API’s. Note that the event library option modifies your JavaScript script file, therefore, it will only work for a website that has the script and also since the file is on our CDN (content delivery network) it will take a few minutes before the updates are available since it has to propagate to multiple locations for speedy delivery.

Here is a quick example of how to record an event:

                        <script type="text/javascript">

                        _fxm.events.push(['recordEvent', 'Page View'}]);

                        </script>

For more details, please see our API page.

Attributes

They describe the person, visit or event that they are assigned to. Attributes can be used to store valuable information about an action. When you assign attributes to a person they are unique to that person and are available to you when you are creating your reports. The same applies to attributes for events and visits.

Imagine you have an online web store and you are using FoxMetrics to track actionable data that you can use to increase your conversion. For every person that visits your online store, you could track an event for each of them with your already existing customer id or email address if any and then you can specify attributes such as first name and last name.

You can get more granular by tracking more details at the visit level such as their landing page and referring URL. We can also do this for you automatically if you the option is set in your dashboard. Once those are set, recording events will be a breeze, simple send us events such as when a person adds an item to their shopping cart and maybe another when they buy those items or maybe remove them.

As you can see from above, you can become very creative on the things that you track, the data that is collected can then be used to create some inspiring reports such as items with high add to cart rate but low buy rate, abandon cart reports, most items viewed and more.

                        <script type="text/javascript">

                        _fxm.events.push(['recordEvent', 'Page View', 0, {url:'http://foxmetrics.com', referrer:'http://google.com'}}]);

                        </script>

For more inspiring examples, please see our Tutorials page