Step-by-step data collection guide

Introduction

Understanding the behavior of your web app visitors is crucial to create optimized content targeted towards them. Event data tells you about their behavior on your web app and it's easy to collect it with Prepr CMS.

With Prepr you can capture events, store and process the data to group these visitors into customer segments and personalize content for them.

Every event is associated with an event type, the time it happened, the customer that triggered the event, the related content item where applicable, and optionally some metadata. Events can be sent to Prepr using the Prepr Tracking Code or the REST API.

Event types

Event types are the types of interactions that a customer has with your content. For example, when a customer views an article. The following event types are predefined in Prepr CMS:

If the Like, Bookmark, or Subscribe events are sent to Prepr more than once, the subsequent events will simply be ignored.

Apart from the predefined event types, you can collect event data for any Custom event. For example, if you want to track when a visitor makes a Purchase or clicks to Start a video or livestream. You can choose any name for the custom event that meets the naming rules below.

• Start the name with a capital letter.
• The name has to be one word. In other words, no spaces.
• Don't include any special characters like %, ˆ, &, etc.
• The name should not start with a number.

Record events using the Tracking Code

You can record events in Prepr CMS by using the Prepr tracking code. Once recorded, you can use these events to create the conditions you need to segment your customers. When you set up personalization, you can then include the segments that you want to target for each personalized variant.

<!-- property tag -->
<meta property="prepr:id" content="16c63a1e-e837-4951-bd9a-b933a8d14b2f"/>
 
<!-- or name tag -->
<meta name="prepr:id" content="16c63a1e-e837-4951-bd9a-b933a8d14b2f"/>

<!-- property tag -->
<meta property="prepr:customer-id" content="16c63a1e-e837-4951-bd9a-b933a8d14b2f"/>
 
<!-- or name tag -->
<meta name="prepr:customer-id" content="16c63a1e-e837-4951-bd9a-b933a8d14b2f"/>

prepr('event', 'Like');

prepr('event', 'Subscribe', { 'id': "16c63a1e-e837-4951-bd9a-b933a8d14b2f" });

prepr('event', 'Tag', ["healthcareworker"]);  

prepr('event', 'Purchase');

Record events using the REST API

With the REST API you can send event data to Prepr. This can be convenient for offline conversions or if you're working in a restricted environment and aren't allowed to load third-party Javascript snippets.

JSON Structure

The table below shows the fields that are supported in the REST API.

You need to supply a customer ID for the event to be recorded.

If the customer ID is not found in your customers list when the event gets processed, a new customer will be created.

Recording events

If you collected all the data, the JSON data object should be posted to the following endpoint:

POST https://tracking.prepr.io/events

{
    "label" : "View",
    "timestamp" : 1609588800, // Optional
    "content_item" : {
        "id" : "76a5e261-ec2a-4bd2-8195-cf7e889b0a68"
    },
    "customer" : {
        "id" : "x-21381723243-PRP"
    }
}

This endpoint requires an HTTP Authorization header with an Access Token containing the capture_publish scope.

If the event was successfully queued the endpoint will return a status code 202 Accepted.

To validate your input, within a few seconds, you'll see the data reflected in the Prepr Segments page.

How search bots impact event data

What are bots?

A search bot, sometimes called a spider, is a robot that continuously browses the internet, usually for the purpose of building a search index or archiving websites.

Bots can either run on servers in a datacenter such as Amazon Web Services, or sometimes, on people’s personal computers that have been infected with malware or a virus (referred to as a botnet).

Some bots, such as GoogleBot, are used for legitimate purposes such as indexing the web.

Bots can artificially inflate event data, so it’s important to be aware of their existence.

Prepr and search bots

Prepr can detect search bots that deliberately reveal themselves. All traffic from known bots and spiders is automatically excluded. This ensures that your Prepr data, to the extent possible, does not include events from known bots. At this time, you cannot disable known bot data exclusion or see how much known bot data was excluded.

Known bot traffic is identified using a combination of our research and the International Spiders and Bots List.

List of excluded bots

Below is a list of search bots and their user-agents that Prepr identifies.