JavaScript Settings

• Events Automatically Tracked
  • “Visited Site”
  • Form Fields
  • “Ad Campaign Hit” (listed in settings as “Google Ad Traffic”)
  • “Search Engine Hit” (listed in settings as “Search Engine Traffic”)
  • “Page View”
• Additional Settings
  • Include URL Host and Subdomain (Event Library)
  • Tagged URLs
  • Respect Do Not Track Header
• Toggling Automatic Behavior

Our JavaScript Library tracks several events for you automatically.

Events Automatically Tracked

If you are using the JavaScript library, we automatically track certain events and properties by default:

• “Visited Site”

  • The Property referrer indicates the URL the visitor came from
  • The Property URL indicates the URL of the page they started browsing your site
  • We record Visited Site once for each visitor’s browsing session. After 30 minutes of inactivity, the next time the visitor comes back will trigger a new Visited Site event, and they will also have the Returning Property set to 1.
  • Returning is also set if your customer has already had the Google Analytics __utma cookie set.

• Form Fields

  • If you set up an event to log a form submission (either through the API call trackSubmit or the Event Library’s ‘Submits a Form’), then we also capture the data from the form’s fields.
  • Each <input> field will be saved as Property; we use the name attribute of the <input>’s to name each Property.
  • Hidden fields and sensitive fields (passwords, credit card numbers, and social security numbers) are not captured.

• “Ad Campaign Hit” (listed in settings as “Google Ad Traffic”)

  • Triggered if a visitor reaches your site via a Google Ad Campaign (eg. paid search). We detect this by checking the URL for ?gclid or ?utm_ parameters, which indicate a URL tagged for ad purposes.
  • All the utm variables will be captured as Properties, if they are present in the URL. Please refer to our article regarding Google Analytics to determine whether the utm variables are available or not:
    • Campaign Source
    • Campaign Medium
    • Campaign Terms
    • Campaign Content
    • Campaign Name

• “Search Engine Hit” (listed in settings as “Search Engine Traffic”)

  • Triggered if a visitor reaches your site via a search engine, through organic search.
  • The Property Search Engine indicates which search engine was used.
  • The Property Search Terms indicates the search terms used.

• “Page View”

  • (disabled by default!)
  • Triggered every time a visitor views any page on your site.
  • The Property Viewed URL indicates the page viewed.
  • The Property Referrer indicates the page last viewed.
  • Enabling this event can quickly use up your event quota, which is why it is initially disabled.

Additional Settings

There are three additional settings that are not tied to specific events:

• Include URL Host and Subdomain (Event Library)

  • With this option on, the Event Wizard can differentiate URL-based events that come from two or more of your subdomains (for example, www.example.com/pricing and subdomain.example.com/pricing are treated differently). With this option off, we don’t use the domain to determine a URL hit (so the previous two URLs would trigger the same event).

• Tagged URLs

  • Enable or disable the use of our URL API.

• Respect Do Not Track Header

  • Different web browsers allow a user to request that they do not be tracked. Toggling this ‘on’ honors that request so that their activity will not be tracked by our JavaScript Library.

Toggling Automatic Behavior

If you’d prefer to, you can toggle whether these events should be tracked or not. Please go to https://app.kissmetrics.com/product.js_settings to do so, which is reached from your site settings. Also, please keep in mind that the JavaScript settings in Kissmetrics only apply to the JavaScript library hosted by Kissmetrics. They do not apply to other official or unofficial libraries (PHP, Ruby, etc.) unless otherwise noted.