Skip to main content

Feature: Custom action

A custom action is any visitor action or state that you want to track on a website, and that is not a basic modification event, conversion, transaction, or product view. You can also use custom actions to find out where visitors are geographically located. The purpose of custom actions is to track what visitors are doing on a site or where they are located, and to use this information to dynamically modify their user experience in some way, for example, by showing specific content based on the page they are viewing or the city they are in.

Here are some examples of custom actions:

  • Button click (for example, the visitor accepts a cookie policy or downloads a brochure)

  • Form submission (for example, the visitor subscribes to a newsletter or leaves a contact request)

  • Geolocation (the current geographic location of the visitor's device)

  • Login status (the visitor is or is not logged in)

For an introduction to custom action tracking in the Frosmo Platform, see Data tracking solutions.

Custom action types​

The Frosmo Platform supports the following custom action types:

  • Basic custom action tracks an activity or state that in some way reflects what the visitor is doing on the site.

  • Geolocation custom action tracks the visitor's device's real-world geographic location. This custom action type only works on desktop devices (including laptop computers).

Event vs. persistent data​

From the point of view of the site, a custom action is an event with a name and value. The name uniquely identifies the custom action, while the value describes a particular variant of the action. A custom action can take as many different values as are needed to track its different variants. However, a given instance of a custom action is always triggered with a single value. For a basic custom action, the value type can be Boolean, number, or string.

For example, the basic custom action Brand tracks the visitor's interest in different product brands with values such as Apple, Google, HTC, and Samsung. Even though this custom action uses multiple different values, it's always triggered with only one of the values, depending on what product the visitor is viewing at the time.

However, from the point of view of the Frosmo Control Panel and the Frosmo back end at large, a custom action is a persistent data object that maps to corresponding events sent from the site. In the back end, the custom action consists of the following fields:

  • Name

  • Description

  • Values

  • Value titles

  • Option to use the custom action as a state in modifications

When a custom action is triggered on the site, the name and value are sent to the Frosmo back end. If an action with that name does not exist, the Frosmo Platform stores the event as a new custom action object. If an action with the same name already exists, the value is added to the existing action. If the value, too, already exists, no new data is stored, and the action is simply triggered. Once stored in the back end, you can view the custom action and its values in the Control Panel.

Using custom actions​

You can use custom actions to:

  • Control whether to display modifications

  • Fire triggers

  • Segment visitors

Before you can use custom actions, however, you must set up tracking for them, so that the Frosmo Platform knows when an action occurs on a site.

Where to go next​