We have a lot of contacts in Mautic without an email address and only an IP Address and not sure how that happened.
I could notice a lot of them are IP Addresses that hit a page at one point in time and got created automatically by Mautic.
Who are they? Why are these page hits not linked to a contact and what would happen if I would delete these “Contact IP Addresses”?
We where suggested it might be some anonymous tracking.
Looking at our tracking settings in Mautic everything is turned off. Should we change this?
These are anonymous users that Mautic is tracking.
If they ever identify themselves in the future, via something like an opt in form, then this anonymous historical data would be assigned to the now known contact. This is a very powerful part of Mautic.
Mautic will track any visitor to your site including bots.
You can delete these records but obv you will lose the historical data should they ever become known contacts.
You can control what tracking you want in settings. What is activated is up to you.
Can you maybe elaborate on how a user makes itself anonymous?
Is it when images in an email sent out aren’t loaded?
Strange thing is that they all have the same ‘Date last active’ - which is always [today].
Date created is also the same for all.
Only ‘date identified’ is unique - so it must be this date we should look at to see how old the anonymous contact is?
A user would not make themselves anonymous. They would remain anonymous until identified. if they never complete a form to ID themselves then they will always be anonymous.
The list will be by date last active by default, so scroll back a few pages and you should see older dates. The same applies to the other variables. If you site is getting a lot of traffic you will be creating lots of anonymous contacts constantly with very similar dates and times. In this case optimise your landing page for conversions and try convert that traffic into known users.
should it be a form linked to mautic with the native mautic form ?
or, if a form disconnected from mautic bring the contact to Mautic will Mautic will make the link between the mail, contact name, and the previous visit thanks to the IP adress in order to have the contact history ?
For mautic to be able to link the IP address of an anonymous visitor with a known contact it needs to be able to drop the mautic cookie into the visitors browser. Only the mautic form can do that so you would need to use a mautic form.
3rd party forms can be set to pass info to mautic but it would not be linked to the anonymous contact.
Here is a work around video I made that might help explain.
Is there a way to disable the anonymous contact harvesting per form?
I have some ultra-low yield forms that wouldn’t make sense to capture the anons. The probability of future signups on those visitors is practically zero and any history associated with them is of no value anyway.
