How It Works

Outlit tracks visitors from their first anonymous pageview through to becoming paying customers. It assigns each visitor a unique ID, captures their behavior automatically, and links everything together when they identify themselves via form submission, login, or signup.

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Why unified tracking matters

Most businesses track customer data in silos:

• Website analytics shows anonymous pageviews
• Product analytics shows authenticated user behavior
• Billing shows payment events

These disconnected systems make it impossible to answer questions like “Which marketing channel brings customers who actually pay?” or “What content did our best customers engage with before signing up?” Outlit connects all of these into a unified customer timeline.

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How the pieces fit together

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What happens when a visitor lands on your site?

When someone visits your website, Outlit immediately begins tracking:

1. Generates a visitor ID - A unique identifier stored in localStorage and cookies that persists across sessions
2. Captures behavior automatically:
   • Pageviews (URL, title, referrer)
   • Form submissions (with sensitive field sanitization)
   • UTM parameters and first-touch attribution
   • Engagement time (active time on each page)
3. Stores events linked to the anonymous visitor ID

At this stage, you know what visitors do, but not who they are. All events are tied to the anonymous visitor ID, waiting to be linked to a real person.

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How does Outlit connect anonymous visitors to known users?

When a visitor identifies themselves—through signup, login, or submitting a form with their email—Outlit resolves their identity:

1. Creates or finds a contact using the email or user ID provided
2. Links the anonymous visitor to that contact
3. Converts historical events into the customer timeline
4. Merges profiles if the same person used different devices or browsers

This happens automatically when forms contain an email field, or manually when you call identify() in your code.

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What about server-side tracking?

For backend events where users are already authenticated:

1. Skip the anonymous phase - Users are already known to your system
2. Emit events directly to the contact using their email or user ID
3. Every call requires identity - No anonymous server events

Server-side tracking is ideal for:

• Subscription lifecycle events (trial started, payment received, churned)
• Backend actions (report generated, export completed)
• Events from systems without browser access

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Privacy and security

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Next steps