Track Your Prospects

14 Mar 2023
8 Minutes to read

Share
Dark
Light

Track Your Prospects

Updated on 14 Mar 2023
8 Minutes to read

Share
Dark
Light

Article Summary

Track Your Prospects provides insights into how your G2 product profile influences buyer behavior by tracking visitors who navigate between your G2 product profile and your website. When a visitor interacts with your G2 product profile and then your website (or vice versa), you receive data about the specific page visited, the duration between visits, and the firmographic information of the visitor.

track your prospects demo

Basics of Track Your Prospects

Data collection

Track Your Prospects creates a client-side, bidirectional cookie that persists for 14 days after a visitor’s most recent activity. This period resets each time a visitor lands on your website or on your G2 product profile page.

Track Your Prospects data will not be recorded if a visitor clears their browsing history before visiting both endpoints. A visitor does not have to commit a specific action on your G2 product profile or your website for event data to be recorded.

Unlike other, third-party methods of attribution tracking, Track Your Prospects does not track the activities of your customers across your website and does not report personally-identifiable information (such as name and address) back to G2.

Cookie details

The following information describes the cookie that G2 uses to collect Track Your Prospects data:

Name: _session_id
Host: tracking.g2crowd.com
Session duration: 14 days
Type: targeting

G2 Buyer Intent data and Track Your Prospects

Like Buyer Intent signals, Track Your Prospects events indicate that a buyer is interested in taking the next step to research your product.

Where Buyer Intent captures enriched data about visitors researching your product and competitors across G2, Track Your Prospects helps attribute G2’s influence on your website traffic while adding firmographic information about your visitors. Use Track Your Prospects events alongside your Buyer Intent signals to completely understand the influence of your G2 product profile on buyers.

Not all visits to G2.com are classified as Buyer Intent data. For example, writing a review does not provide a signal of a potential buyer and is excluded from Buyer Intent.

For more information on G2 Buyer Intent data, refer to the Buyer Intent documentation.

Implementation

Option 1: Initializing the Track Your Prospects tag via your website's source code

The simplest way to implement the Track Your Prospects tag is by pasting the embed code into your website's source code. If you don't have access to modify your website's source code, refer to option 2.

To begin tracking your prospects:

Go to my.G2, then Buyer Activity > Track Your Prospects.
Move the Enable Prospect Tracking slider to the ON position.
Choose your tracking tag type:

JavaScript (preferred): This code is asynchronous and does not prevent other elements on your page from loading.
Pixel Tag: This code renders an invisible 1x1 pixel on your website.

Select Copy embed to copy your preferred tracking tag to your clipboard. Paste a copy of the tracking tag in the body (between the <body> and </body> tags) of your website for every page you want to track traffic.

You must add a unique Track Your Prospects tag to your website for each of your organization’s G2-listed products. To switch between the my.G2 pages for each of your products, first expand the dropdown at the top of the page by selecting your product name, then select the product you want to view from the list provided.

Option 2: Initializing the Track Your Prospects tag via Google Tag Manager

Don’t have access to modify the source code of your website? You can use a tag management software such as Google Tag Manager to generate custom HTML tags that fire for specified event triggers.

To begin tracking your prospects:

Go to my.G2, then Buyer Activity > Track Your Prospects.
Move the Enable Prospect Tracking slider to the ON position.
Choose your tracking tag type:

JavaScript (preferred): This code is asynchronous and does not prevent other elements on your page from loading.
Pixel Tag: This code renders an invisible 1x1 pixel on your website.

Select Copy embed to copy your preferred tracking tag to your clipboard
Navigate to Google Tag Manager and select the container associated with your website.
Create a new tag by navigating to Workspace > Tags, then selecting New.
Select the Tag Configuration panel to reveal the Choose tag type sidebar.
Select Custom HTML. Paste your embed into the text box provided.
Assign triggers by selecting the Triggering panel. G2 recommends firing the tag on All Pages (Page View) by default.
Name your tag, then select Save.

You must submit and publish the changes to your Google Tag Manager container to apply Track Your Prospects to your website.

Custom IDs

The custom ID field of the Track Your Prospects tag enables you to associate prospects with unique identifiers, such as Google Analytics IDs or UTM IDs. Data inserted into the custom ID field appears in the Custom ID column of the Track Your Prospects tab, and in CSV exports of your Track Your Prospects data.

For more information on using Google Tag Manager to populate the custom ID field, refer to the Identify G2 buyers on your website using Google Analytics section.

my.G2 custom IDs

To pass a value to Track Your Prospects, insert your unique identifier into the highlighted region of each tag type.

JavaScript tag:

<script>
(function (c, p, d, u, id, i) {
id = ' YOUR CUSTOM ID '; // Optional Custom ID for user in your system
u = 'https://tracking.g2crowd.com/attribution_tracking/conversions/' + c + '.js?
p=' + encodeURI(p) + '&e=' + id;
i = document.createElement('script');
i.type = 'application/javascript';
i.async = true;
i.src = u;
d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(i);
}("000", document.location.href, document));

Pixel tag:

<img src="https://tracking.g2crowd.com/attribution_tracking/conversions/000.gif?e=YOUR CUSTOM ID/>

Analytics and data export

Once you have embedded a tracking tag on your desired webpage(s), Track Your Prospects begins recording bidirectional traffic between your G2 profile and your webpage(s).

Choose one of the preset timeframes or set a custom timeframe to view the traffic that occurred during your timeframe of interest.

Use the graph to easily analyze trends in the traffic between G2 and your website.

track your prospects analytics

The table view offers more details about each data point represented in the graph, including the:

Industry and organization associated with your visitor
Country where the headquarters of their company is located
First action the visitor committed to trigger the tag
Next action the visitor committed to trigger the tag
Time between tag triggers

To export the Track Your Prospects data that occurred in the timeframe you selected:

Select Download CSV. G2 begins generating your report. The time this takes varies based on the amount of traffic received and the timeframe you selected.
When the report finishes generating, select the file link to begin your download. Your CSV contains all the information seen in the table view.

To parse out data where a visitor’s organization and industry could not be determined, sort your CSV by the Organization or Industry column and then remove the undesired “unknown” values.

Example: Identify G2 buyers on your website using Google Analytics

Once you've added the Track Your Prospects tag to your site via Google Tag manager, you can easily populate the custom ID field of Track Your Prospects events with Google Analytics data.

For example, the Google Analytics client ID is a string of numbers that can be used to identify the navigation actions of an individual visitor on your website. Adding this data to Track Your Prospects enables you to track how a buyer navigates across your website before, during, and after researching your product on G2.

Before proceeding with these steps, ensure the Track Your Prospects tag is active in your Google Tag Manager container. For more information, refer to the Initializing the Track Your Prospects tag in Google Tag Manager section.

1. Create a variable to capture the client ID

Sending the client ID to a Google Tag Manager variable enables you to add it to the custom ID field of the Track Your Prospects tag.

To create the Google Tag Manager variable:

Go to your Google Tag Manager container, then select the Variables tab.
Select New, then name your variable with a descriptive name, such as Return Client ID.
Select the Variable Configuration panel to reveal the Choose variable type sidebar.
Select Custom JavaScript, then paste the following code into the textbox:

function(){
try{
    var tracker = ga.getAll()[0]
    return tracker.get('clientId');
} catch(e) {
  return false;
  }
}

Select Save.

2. Create a custom tag trigger

Creating a custom tag trigger for this workflow ensures that your Track Your Prospects tag will not fire until the visitor's client ID is available in Google Analytics.

To create the Google Tag Manager trigger:

In your Google Tag Manager container, navigate to the Triggers tab.
Select New, then name your variable with a descriptive name, such as Track Your Prospects Trigger.
Select the Trigger Configuration panel to reveal the Choose trigger type sidebar.
Select Window Loaded.
Select Save.

3. Add your custom variable and trigger to the Track Your Prospects tag

You can add your client ID variable and custom trigger to the Track Your Prospects tag by editing the tag configuration.

To add your variable and trigger:

In your Google Tag Manager container, navigate to the Tags tab.
Select the name of your Track Your Prospects tag to open the tag editor.
Find the custom ID field of your preferred tag. If using the Javascript tag, the quotation marks follow the ID variable of the script (id = ‘YOUR CUSTOM ID‘). If using the Pixel tag, insert your custom ID after the query parameter at the end of the URL (?e=YOUR CUSTOM ID"/>).
Type two open braces, {{ , within the custom ID field of your preferred tag. This action displays a list of all the variables in your Google Tag Manager container.
Select the name of the variable you created to add it to the tag.
If you have an existing trigger, such as an All pages trigger, remove it by selecting the Triggering panel, then selecting the - icon.
Select the Triggering panel to access the Choose a trigger window, then select the name of the trigger you created in the Create a custom tag trigger section
Select Save.

You must submit and publish the changes to your Google Tag Manager container to apply them to your website.

Viewing buyer navigation data in Google Analytics

To view buyer navigation data:

Go to my.G2, then Buyer Activity > Track Your Prospects.
From the Track Your Prospects Analytics table, find an event you want to track in Google Analytics, then copy the string in the Custom ID field to your clipboard.
Go to Google Analytics > User Explorer. Paste the Custom ID from step 2 into the search bar, then select the search icon.
Select the corresponding ID from the search results to view the buyer’s navigation history across your website.

What's Next

Widgets

Table of contents

Basics of Track Your Prospects
Implementation
Custom IDs
Analytics and data export
Example: Identify G2 buyers on your website using Google Analytics