Introducing Element Tracking for the Web
We’re excited to announce the release of Snowplow’s Element Tracking plugin for the JavaScript and Browser web trackers.
Element Tracking is a new tool that enables organizations to seamlessly track the presence and visibility of web page components. Building on our suite of event tracking plugins (including Link, Button, and Form tracking), this plugin brings a deeper level of business insight and operational efficiency to web analytics and personalization.
What’s New?
Snowplow’s Element Tracking plugin continuously monitors page contents for changes that match rules you specify. It then automatically fires events when matching elements appear on the page, are scrolled into/out of view, or removed from the page again.
These features let you track specific page components or elements on a page in a generic way, enabling easy implementation for use cases such as:
- Impression tracking
- Recommendation & personalization tracking
- Per-element scroll depth tracking
- Content based heat-mapping
- Component-centric funnels
- Modal/over-the-Page tracking
- Scroll tracking
Key Benefits
- Enhance the Full Customer Journey: Go beyond click tracking to capture what users actually see, not just what they interact with. Impression data provides a more comprehensive view of user behavior, helping you understand the true impact of your site’s content, recommendations, and promotions.
- Supercharge Personalization and Recommendations: Impression tracking completes personalization and recommendation engines. While click data offers insight, alone it can be limited as users typically click on only a few items. By capturing what users have seen but not clicked, you unlock a wealth of negative signal-enabling machine learning models to learn from both engagement and avoidance, and powering more relevant, effective recommendations.
- Accelerate Time-to-Value: With out-of-the-box in-view and impression events, you can quickly implement complex tracking solutions without the need for custom code or manual event wiring. This dramatically reduces engineering effort and speeds up deployment, letting your teams focus on driving business outcomes rather than building tracking infrastructure.
- Improve Data Quality for AI and Analytics: Easily configure elaborate rules (such as minimum time in view or percentage of element visible) to ensure you’re only capturing meaningful exposures. This results in cleaner, more reliable data for your analytics and machine learning models, reducing noise and bias while improving the accuracy of your insights and predictions.
- Consistent, Scalable Tracking: Manage your tracking centrally and deploy it across multiple pages or sites with a single configuration. The plugin is built to work in modern environments-including tag managers and single-page applications, so you can scale your analytics with confidence.
Key Features
- Specify elements of interest with rules using CSS Selectors
- Automatically track events when matching elements:
- Exist on page load
- Are added dynamically to the page
- Get scrolled into view
- Get scrolled out of view
- Are removed from the page or no longer match
- Configure how often events should fire: always, per element, per pageview
- Viewability constraints: define minimum sizes and times elements should be on-screen before firing visibility events
- Define custom data to extract from the elements and their content
- Track statistics like size and time on screen for specific elements
- Define a hierarchy of components or features to aggregate events by
- Include element status as entities on other events for behavior over time
Get Started Today
The Element Tracking plugin is available now and compatible with Browser and JavaScript trackers version 3 and 4. To get started, simply install the plugin, configure the elements of interest, and start realizing richer business insights and faster time-to-value from your web data.
More Resources