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Inactivity Listening lets you show a dialogue to a customer or visitor who has been inactive for a while. It does so by throwing an "inactivity" event whenever inactivity is detected. Dialogues can use this event as an activation trigger by selecting "Show on Event" and "Inactivity" on the dialogue's When tab.

Using the Inactivity listener to track customer behavior

To use the listener, two things have to be done:

1. You need to configure the BlueConic Inactivity Listener.
2. You need to create a dialogue to handle "inactivity" events thrown by the listener.

Configure the Inactivity listener

The Inactivity listener takes the following parameters:

Activate after

Set to the number of seconds to wait for user inactivity before throwing the "Inactivity" event.

Activate when

Choose the items that define "user inactivity":

• Activate "the user does not click" to reset the inactivity timer when the user clicks.
• Activate "the user does not enter values in the form" to reset the inactivity timer when the user enters a value in a form field.

Configure a BlueConic dialogue to track customer activity

The Inactivity Listener will throw an event named "inactivity". To react to this event you need to create a new dialogue that will show when the "inactivity" event is thrown:

1. Select Dialogues from the BlueConic navigation bar.
2. Click Add Dialogue.
3. On the Who tab, select the segments that define your audience.
4. On the Where tab, select the channels you want the dialogue to appear on.
5. On the What tab edit your dialogue as you would normally.
6. On the When tab, select "Show on Event" and "Inactivity".
7. Enable the Dialogue and save it.

FAQ: Can I use multiple inactivity listeners?

Yes, you can configure multiple inactivity listeners to trigger after a set amount of time. However, only the first listener will trigger for any given page. 
Best practice: The best approach is to set up different listeners for different channels, or restricted to different pages. For example, you can configure a listener to trigger after 60 seconds of inactivity on page A, with another listener set to trigger after 90 seconds on page B.

Note: You cannot have multiple listeners triggering on the same page.

Using the inactivity event

The Inactivity Listener throws an event whenever it detects inactivity. This event is named inactivity and can be picked up by other listeners to define behavior.

Behavior listener

For example, below is an example listener that picks up on the event and keeps track of the number of times the event fired:

1. Select Listeners from the BlueConic navigation bar.
2. Add a new Behavior Listener.
3. Add a rule of type "Advanced Event".
4. Select the value and profile property as you would in any listener.
5. Click "select event", select "Custom defined event", enter inactivity, and click OK.
6. Leave the selections "contains any word" and "any value" as they are.
7. Name your new listener and click Save.

This behavior listener will now set the property as you defined every time a visitor becomes inactive.

Custom JavaScript

Alternatively, you can subscribe to the event in your custom JavaScript code using the JavaScript Front-end API's event.subscribe(), as shown here:

blueConicClient.event.subscribe('inactivity', this, function() {
  alert('inactivity event fired');
});

Privacy management

Listeners can be added to Objectives, allowing for privacy management of the information that is being picked up. The listener will only update a profile if the visitor consented to at least one of the objectives that it is linked to.