PropFuel Website Engagement: Identifying site visitors

Give known visitors a smoother experience on your website by letting PropFuel know who they are. When a visitor is already logged in to your site, PropFuel can match that person and use the data you already have to personalize their experience on the website.

• Recognizes logged‑in visitors using your existing website authentication

• Connects page views and interactions to their PropFuel profile & conversation history

• Once identified, all previous anonymous interactions recorded for that session are attributed to the correct user profile

To identify the user, you need to pass an Authentication Method from the logged-in user on your site to the PropFuel web plugin. The two primary ways to do this are:

If you have an integration with your AMS installed in PropFuel, you can reference a record by the Unique ID in your AMS. PropFuel will match this against the contact records that have been pulled through your integration.

If you do not have an AMS integration installed, or do not have access to the AMS Unique ID within your website, you can also pass an email address to PropFuel for authentication. In this case, we will search for an existing contact with a matching email address, and create one if it does not already exist.

Once you know what you want to pass over, you need to tell PropFuel what to look for when it runs on your site.

This can be configured in Settings → Website Engagement, then open the Authentication section.

Choose the Authentication Method you would like to pass over, either External ID or Email.

Now you need to tell PropFuel where that data lives. The most common locations are:

Cookie: If you already have a cookie set on your website that stores the unique ID, enter the name of the cookie and PropFuel will pull it automatically.

JavaScript Variable: This allows you to inject the value on your site, either by referencing an existing variable where the email or external ID already lives, or by using personalization tokens in your CMS to add the value to your site template.

Once the plugin settings are saved, the Website Engagement settings page will give you a new tag to install on your site that references the Authentication Method you would like to pass to PropFuel. This will need to be installed in your website template in order to run. If you have already installed the PropFuel plugin without any authentication information, replace your current tag with the newly generated one.

Here is an example of what the authentication call will look like

w.PropFuel.init('xxxx', {
    authentication: {
        service: "external_id",
        cookieName: "user_id",
        integration_id: "dynamics_cloud"
    }
});

This code is telling the PropFuel plugin that we are passing an external_id, that should be used to identify a user through the MS Dynamics Cloud integration, and the user id can be found in a cookie named user_id.

While conceptually straight forward, there are some common situations where passing user information to the PropFuel plugin is not possible due to your website setup.

In many cases, organizations have a website powered by a CMS (association.org), and a member portal powered by their AMS (members.association.org). If there is not an existing SSO bridge between those two different sites, then the main website is not actually aware of whether or not someone is logged in or who they are.

In that case you can not pass authentication information from your main website to PropFuel, because you don't have it there. However, you could install the PropFuel tag on both sites, and as long as someone has hit your member portal one time while logged in, PropFuel will track them across both sites.

In some cases, the association site and the member portal/login page are on different domains, so instead of association.org and members.association.org, it would be association.org and association.ams.org.

In that case, you could still identify people on association.ams.org, however the session cookies that PropFuel uses to track people across your sites would not carry over to association.org, because they are on two different domains.

This is a limitation on how cookies work and how browsers have implemented limitations on tracking users across multiple domains.

For help on strategy and implementation around passing authentication information to PropFuel, please reach out to support@propfuel.com. We will be happy to have our technical team take a look at your website and member portal setup and discuss the best strategy for personalizing your member experience.