Engagement Tracking With ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign makes it easy for you to implement engagement tracking. They have a set of engagement tracking automations available for import into your account. I say set because there is a Part 1 and Part 2 of the automation and each part is its own automation but they are used together. You can import the automations into your account by clicking on the links below (be sure to import both part 1 and 2):

While these automations are perfectly fine as is, I recommend that after you install them you make a couple of changes that will make them even more helpful to you. The first thing I suggest is that you rename the tags so that you can easily find them in your tag list and the second thing is add a Last Engagement Date custom field to your account.

Suggested Modifications To The Engagement Tracking Automations #

Rename Tags Used in the Automation #

When you import the automations, you will see that they use the following tags:

Engaged
Recent activity
Disengaged
Inactive

I find that once you begin using ActiveCampaign and understand the power of tags, you may easily have 50+ tags in your account. Using the tags as named above is fine when you have just a few tags to track. Once you have many tags, you’ll want to group like tags so that you can easily find them in the list.

Grouping tags by function is one way to name your tags. Therefore, I recommend that the tags above be renamed as:

Engagement: Engaged
Engagement: Recent activity
Engagement: Disengaged
Engagement: Inactive

If you want to keep your tag names short, you could abbreviate Engagement to simply “Eng” and the tag name would be Eng: Engaged. Some people prefer to put square brackets around the function, so the tag would be [Engagement] Recent activity. There is no right or wrong way to name your tags, you just want to be consistent in your naming convention.

Add Last Engagement Date Custom Field to ActiveCampaign account #

The second change that I suggest you make is add a new custom field to your account and name it Last Engagement Date. This field will be populated with the current date each time a contact enters Part 2 of your newly imported engagement tracking automation.

Steps to add a custom field #

Click on Contacts from your main menu in ActiveCampaign.
Click on Fields from the sub-menu.
Click the button labelled Add Field in the upper right of the screen.
Enter the name of the field as Last Engagement Date and the field type Date in the spaces provided.

Select **Fields** from the Contacts sub-menu.

Enter the field **name** and **type** in the space provided.

Make Changes to Automations #

Add action to update Last Engagement Date field #

Open the automation named Part 2 – Engagement Tagging first. You will insert a new action to update the newly created custom field Last Engagement Date.

Click on Contacts to expand the Contact actions available from the right hand Actions menu.
Select Update a Contact action from the choices.
Drag the Update a Contact action into the automation flow right at the first plus sign above the Exit the automation: Part 1 – Engagement Tagging.
Select Last Engagement Date from the list of Contact fields to update.
Select current time from the options under New content.

Steps to update a custom field in an ActiveCampaign automation

Now, you will know the very last time a contact engaged with your email or website. The date will be stored with the contact record.

Make sure the tags in Part 1 automation match your modified tag names #

Since we renamed the tags, we’ll want to be sure that the newly created tags are being used in the automations. Open the automation named Part 1 – Engagement Tagging. Go through each Add tag and Remove tag action and change the original tags to the renamed tags. The Add tag and Remove tag actions are not automatically updated when the tag name is changed. You must rename the tags manually.