When you enable people tracking, Inline Manual will start tracking your website or application users. With that data, you can access reports to see who they are, and their behaviors. You can use these reports to discover where they are from, which tutorials they completed, and their latest activity.



In this article, we’ll show you how to enable people tracking.


How to enable people tracking

To enable people tracking and allow Inline Manual to gather information about your users, you need to first enable analytics. Next, add few lines of code above the regular player code.


If your application is a single page application (Angular/React/Vue/…), follow these instructions.


Place the script tag with window.inlineManualTracking = {} code above the line which embeds Inline Manual Player to your web application.


See example implementation below:


<script>
  window.userObject = {
    uid: "1", // Only this field is mandatory
    email: "[email protected]",
    username: "johndoe",
    name: "John Doe",
    created: 1360610467,
    updated: 1433168312,
    roles: ["admin", "editor"],
    group: "Doe & Partners Inc.",
    plan: "Gold"
  }
</script>

<script>InlineManual("boot", userObject);</script>

Your application should replace the values set above with the currently logged in user id. The uid is the only field that is required and can be anything that is unique for the current user - a string, integer, number, e-mail etc.


The created and updated fields are in UNIX Timestamp format in seconds.


To use variables from your application, replace the values with the variable name. For example:


<script>
  window.userObject = {
    uid: app_uid,
    email: app_email,
    username: app_username,
    name: app_name,
    created: app_created,
    updated: app_updated,
    roles: app_roles,
    group: app_group,
    plan: app_plan
  }
</script>
You can add your own custom attributes. If you need to pass, for example, company info, you can create a custom attribute and send that information.


To check if people tracking is enabled correctly, go to Inline Manual portal and see if, under the Site -> People tab, there are any users profiles gathered.


In the People tracking dashboard, you will see data such as:


UID - unique user's ID.
Username - username, login.
Name - user's name.
Roles - user's role.
Created - the date when the user's profile was created.
First seen - first seen by the Inline Manual player.
Last seen - last seen by the Inline Manual player.
Plays - the number of Topics played in total by a user.
Completions - the number of guides completed by a user. By default, the guide is completed when the last step of a walkthrough is reached. You can change it in the MISC panel, e.g. if you want a guide to be completed if a user reaches certain step, you can set up that step as END even though it is not the last one.
Step - the number of steps a user have seen altogether.
Hits - the number of page visits on the website.


When to use people tracking

With people tracking, you can gather information about your users and see who they are. This is especially useful when you want to deepen your knowledge about your users and make improvements to your topics and application. Understanding your users is crucial.


What’s also important, is that enabled people tracking is required to automatically play your walkthroughs.


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