For Salespanel’s EU customers as well as non-EU customers processing personal data of visitors from EU/EEA, Salespanel provides a way to comply with GDPR, so that tracking is only done if the visitor consents.
What is Salespanel web tracking?
With Salespanel’s web tracking feature, you can track companies and persons that are making visits to your website. Web tracking keeps records of all the webpage visits the website visitor has made, referrer details, and their IP address. As webpage visits and the IP address are used to identify your visitors individually, they are considered Personal Data under GDPR.
By default, Salespanel tracks all the visitors coming to your website using web cookies. You can find more information about our cookie policy in Salespanel’s privacy policy.
How GDPR influences web tracking
Under GDPR, you need to notify your customers about what personal data you are processing through a privacy notice and also need to collect consent for processing this personal data. You can collect consent for tracking the visitor by adding a “tracking consent” notice on your webpages. This notice should contain a button that the visitor can click to give their consent.
GDPR compliance applies to those Salespanel customers that are operating within the EU, and also the customers that are offering goods and services to the individuals from the EU.
How to update web tracking settings to obtain consent for GDPR compliance
We recommend you ask you to send this article to your web developer so they can safely make the necessary changes required for GDPR compliance.
Update the “track by default” setting in the web tracking code
Salespanel tracks all the visitors coming to your website by default. This setting is handled by sp_track_by_default which has a default value set to true. You will have to change this setting by adding the following code after the web tracking code:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.salespanelSettings = {
"sp_track_by_default": false
};
</script>
Set up tracking consent notice
You will have to add a tracking consent notice on your pages which informs your visitors about what information is being collected, and how it will be used. The tracking consent notice also contains an “Agree” button that when clicked, takes explicit consent from the visitors to track them.
Note: you can also use a cookie manager to handle the consent part.
Activate tracking when the visitor provides explicit consent
As soon as the visitor provides their consent i.e. they click on the “Agree” button, you can activate the web tracking for that visitor. For this, you will need to trigger a JavaScript function:
$salespanel.push(["set", "tracking:allowTracking"]);
Once activated, Salespanel will track this visitor on all webpages and across sessions.
If you are using a cookie manager ex. Cookiebot, you can add the above JavaScript code in its callback like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEventListener('CookiebotOnAccept', function (e) {
if (Cookiebot.consent.marketing) {
//Execute code that sets marketing cookies
$salespanel.push(["set", "tracking:allowTracking"]);
}
}, false);
</script>
You can learn more about Cookiebot’s callback here: Documentation.
Why a cookie manager isn’t enough when it comes to GDPR compliance
A cookie manager (or cookie management system) is a privacy solution that allows you to manage cookies and online tracking and helps you comply with data protection laws and privacy regulations like GDPR installed by various countries.
But most of these cookie managers fail you to comply with GDPR because they let the cookie be stored first, and after that, they ask the visitor for their consent to store all or some of the cookies and also allow web tracking. If the visitor declines to give their consent, they delete the cookies added earlier to destroy the current tracking session. At the same time, they add a non-identifying cookie so they can still keep tracking the visitor as an anonymous person. This means there will always be a cookie added to keep tracking the visitor’s activity. This doesn’t comply with GDPR rules in the true sense.
Salespanel only tracks the visitor when they have given their explicit permission. In case the visitor declines to consent, there will be no data kept for that visitor.
Further reading: