Tagging & Tracking Individual Clicks

Clearview Social lets you individually identify the people in your social network, so you can pinpoint their clicks personally later.

Michael Faliero avatar
Written by Michael Faliero
Updated over a week ago

This setting can be located through Company Settings and Find Out Who.  This feature is available to everyone at every Clearview Social pricing tier.

What is Find out Who?

Have you ever been shopping for a product on one website, then seen advertisements for the item you were considering buying on a completely different website? This is a technology known as "tracking cookies"—they help websites learn more about you in two steps. First, they assign you information at a point in time where they know something about you: who you are, where you're browsing from, what you're shopping for. Then, at a later point in time when you are doing something different, they recall that earlier action and use it to supplement information about your current activity they wouldn't have known if they hadn't assigned you the cookie earlier.

By sending people through a tracking link on Clearview Social, you can drop a personally identifiable cookie on their Internet Browser, so later they can be personally identified as the "Find Out Who Clicked" on links.

As of May 2020, In compliance with GDPR regulations, Clearview Social is now detecting if an inbound request to our link forwarder comes from a country within the EU. If the request is made from within the EU, we "anonymize" the request by changing the 4th octet of the IP address to 0. Example, if *204.12.15.138* came in, and was an EU address, we'd mask it as *204.12.15.0*. Once we mask the IP address, we check it for click legitimacy, and also look it up in the ASN database. The ASN database is used to retrieve the source organization/isp name for display in Find Out Who. Since the IP address is anonymized, we are no longer considered to be storing personally identifiable information for a click, and since the ASN lookup is made based on the masked IP address, the processing is also no longer considered to be on PII. Because of this, for accounts using the Advanced Find Out Who feature, link tracking for users who click in the EU, are no longer tracked.

For further questions on compliance with GDPR and other regulations please check out our Legal Page or contact us at support@clearviewsocial.com.

How To Assign A Cookie When The User's Identity Is Clear

We won't know who a user is at the point in time when they click on one of your Clearview Social shares—that is happening away from systems you (or we!) have any control over, such as inside LinkedIn's internal ecosystem. There are other points in time, though, such as mail merges or event signup forms, where you are handing out URLs that are personal at the per-user level. We will capitalize on one of these times to assign the cookie.

To assign a tracking cookie to a user, have them click on the following link on the way to some other landing page, supplying their personal data in the italicized fields:
http://cvsoci.al/intellidirect302?id=(company id)&redir=(url)&name=(name)&company=(company)&email=(email) 

Sample: Putting That Tracking URL Together For A MailChimp Mail Merge

 In our example, let's say we are sending out the company holiday card to our mailing list, so anyone who opens the email is heading to www.myfirm.com/holidaycard.html. So we'll create a cvsoci.al tracking link that sends them here after dropping the tracking cookie.

It can be copied and pasted off of https://app.clearviewsocial.com/org/settings/tagging.

Replace the "redir=" parameter with your landing page, URL-encoded

You can URL Encode a link by replacing its special characters with escape codes here. Our url is now:
http://cvsoci.al/intellidirect302?id=1010&redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myfirm.com%2Fholidaycard.html&name=(name)&company=(company)&email=(email) 

Replace the user-specific fields with the platform's merge codes to make this URL unique per recipient

In our example, we're using MailChimp, so here is the URL with MailChimp merge codes in place of name, company, and email.
http://cvsoci.al/intellidirect302?id=1010&redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myfirm.com%2Fholidaycard.html&name=*|FNAME|*%20*|LNAME|*&company=*|USER:COMPANY|*&email=*|EMAIL|*

Here's another example, this time using Vuture fields.
http://cvsoci.al/intellidirect302?id=1010&redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myfirm.com%2Fholidaycard.html&name={First Name}{Last Name}&company={Company}&email={From Email} 

Send the mass mail

Every recipient who clicks the link is now very briefly stopping at the cvsocial server and having their browser cookie'd as their name, company and email, so if they ever click a link you've shared through Clearview Social, we will know it was them personally.

Sit back and continue sharing through Clearview Social as per usual

Results might take a while to kick in. One day, you'll share a link to LinkedIn, and somebody who has a cookie on them from the tracking links will click your update, and we'll know for certain it was them. This brings "Find Out Who Clicked" to a whole new level!

Any Further Questions?

If there is anything else we can assist you with, you can contact Clearview Social Support either by emailing support@clearviewsocial.com or through the Intercom chat button in the bottom right of the site.

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