The Client
Our client is a Martech agency that performs marketing automation and strategic guidance to e-publishing businesses (large newspapers predominantly). They serve the leading US newspaper businesses, which collectively account for 60% market share.
Challenge
Project Description
We delivered a web plugin that is easy to integrate into the existing web-based IT ecosystem, and that doesn’t affect page speed and overall performance. The plugin allows the client to identify anonymous website visitors that apply such measures as VPN, incognito mode, clearing cache, cookies, and browser storage.
Let’s overview how the plugin works:
- The user visits the site no matter in regular or anonymous mode. The plugin creates a fingerprint for this user, collecting one’s device and browser data: IP address, browser type, browser version, device model, screen size, language settings, and more.
- Based on that fingerprint, the unique user ID is calculated to define a concrete user from session to session, which enables anonymous website visitor tracking over time.
Even if a previously identified user starts a new website session, applying VPN, incognito mode, clearing cache, cookies, or browser storage, the plugin still recognizes this visitor by ID and keeps on tracking this user activity, not losing its attribution. Besides, the plugin can identify users in social media and multiple users, utilizing single account.
The accuracy of anonymous visitors identification is 91%.
Thus, the plugin enables tracking user’s behavior on the newspaper website as well as device and browser parameters over the long haul without interruptions.
The data it collects is predominantly used by:
- CDP (Customer data platform) to aggregate and store user data for audience analysis and segmentation
- User Engagement System to apply personalized engagement strategies – including adjustment of page layouts, incentives and offers, notifications, etc – based on the user data from the CDP
- Paywall to set the limits of free content availability per user per month
- Google Analytics (installed on a newspaper website) to extend standard GA events with some additional ones, like (new visitor appearance, paywall appearance, regwall appearance).
To sum up, the plugin helps not to lose track of users who apply the most common anonymization tactics. Anonymous activity of a visitor complements this visitor activity track instead of starting a new one (and losing part of his behavior), resulting in comprehensive customer profiles, more accurate engagement strategies, and timely restricting of a free content.
Key features
Anonymous visitor identification of a newspaper website visitors, resilient to VPN, incognito mode, clearing cache, cookies, and browser storage (fingerprint technique is used as a basis)
Uninterrupted track of user activity on the newspaper website (page visits, clicks, payments, subscription purchase, pauses, and terminations, etc)
Collecting visitor device and browser parameters, communicating this data to customer data platform, user engagement system, paywall
Integration with Google Analytics to supplement Tag Manager with additional behavioral metrics
Team & Time Frame
Our team completed the project in 5 months, and comprised:
Front-end developer
Back-end developer
Major Tech Stack
TypeScript, Azure Cloud, .Net Core, MS SQL
Results
The plugin we developed to identify newspaper website visitors provides an extended picture of the audience behavior, turning anonymous visitor activity to a source of additional, supplementary insights. The outcomes gained enable deeper personalization of engagement strategies and better control of free content limits. This eventually leads to increased conversions and content monetization.
