How it Works

SiteHound does two things:

Make it really easy to track key events on your website based on the user visiting particular URLs or URL patterns.
Automatically augment your tracking with a bunch of useful properties for marketing and product engagement analysis.

Tracking key events

SiteHound is designed around the observation that most key events useful for answering business-centric questions are linked to users viewing particular types of pages. For example:

An e-commerce site should likely track when users view each of the following:
- landing page
- category page
- product page
- cart page
- checkout page
- order complete page
For a SaaS business, relevant pages to track typically include:
- landing pages
- blog articles
- content marketing pages
- trial/demo signup
- product dashboard
- subscription upgrade success

SiteHound makes it super-easy to track key events via a single configuration object that maps event names to URL patterns and/or <body> CSS classes, typically covering many or most required events in one easily comprehendible and maintainable location.

Here’s an example:

sitehound.track = {
  'Home': '/',
  'Blog': '/blog/*',
  'Category': ['/womens-clothes/', '/mens-clothes/', '/chidrens-clothes/'],
  'Product': '/product/*',
  'Cart': '/cart',
  'Order Complete': '/checkout/success/',
  'Checkout': '/checkout/*'
}

Marketing and engagment data

Typical analytics tools such as Segment and Mixpanel don’t do a great job of tracking all source attribution and behaviour data. This makes it hard/impossible to answer many key questions about campaign success and user behaviour.

SiteHound automatically augments your tracking with a bunch of useful properties on each user and event, including:

First, mid and last-touch source attribution
Landing page and initial referrer
User login/logout and identification with automatic aliasing
Session tracking with duration and session depth information for every event

Tracking custom events

Tracking custom events and properties is straightforward via identify() and track()/trackLink()/trackForm() calls using a interface familiar to anyone who’s used Segment.com’s analytics.js.

Implementation

SiteHound consists of a core Javascript library, plus a snippet used to load the core library. See Getting Started for how to implement SiteHound on your site.

Sitehound implements a pluggable javascript interface supporting Segment’s analytics.js and Mixpanel.js, with easy development of support for other platforms possible via creation of new adaptors.

Next: To get SiteHound up and running see Getting Started