If you are using the Pro version of PersonalizeWP then the plugin will start tracking visitor activity as soon as they begin browsing the site.
Initially, users are stored as anonymous profiles, until they provide their details through a purchase or form submission, or login to a user account on the site. Once these events occur, any information captured or entered will be associated with the profile, changing it to a known user.
Retaining anonymous profiles
For some websites, you may not wish to capture and store known user profile data – for instance, your legal team may advise that this is PII (Personally Identifiable Information) that should not be kept in your database.
However, you still want to keep tracking, segmenting and scoring visitors, as this benefits your marketing and campaign targeting activities.
Anonymise Profiles Setting
In this situation, you can choose to use the Anonymise Profiles option on the Settings screen of the plugin. This option, when enabled, will ensure that any data entered or captured on your site will not be recorded on a Visitor Profile or stored in your database.
PersonalizeWP will continue to track visitor activity, such as page visits, form submissions, login events or product purchases, but will do this without updating anby of the profile data fields even when the data is present.
It will also continue to put users into the segments that you have created and set rules for, and add scores for completing actions, meaning that you can continue to use PersonalizeWP to personalize user journeys and target content at users based on your needs.
Existing Data
If you have already captured user data in your visitor profiles before you enabled the Anonymise Profiles setting, this data will not be anonymised and may need to be removed manually by deleting profiles or data from the database.