How Tracking Works

Tracking, in one line

Customer History records activity on your server as pages load, and reads your existing WooCommerce orders. There is no third-party service, no front-end tracking script, and no marketing cookie — everything is written straight to your own WordPress database.

What happens when you activate it

There’s no wizard and nothing to connect. The moment the plugin is active:

• Your existing WooCommerce customers and orders become customer profiles.
• New on-site activity — the pages people view, what they search for, and what they add to the cart — starts being recorded as it happens.

You don’t import anything, and you don’t add any code to your theme.

How a visit is recorded

Recording happens server-side, in PHP, as a page finishes loading — not through JavaScript running in the visitor’s browser. For each recorded page, the plugin writes a single row that describes the visit.

What gets recorded

Each row captures a small, deliberate set of fields:

• The page — the path the visitor is on (for example a product or category page).
• The visitor — their WordPress user ID, if they’re logged in.
• Referrer — the address they arrived from, exactly as the browser reports it.
• A session identifier — so several page views in one visit can be grouped together.
• IP address and a timestamp.

A few specific WooCommerce actions are recorded the same way: an on-site search (with the keyword), an add-to-cart (with the product), and a completed order (linked back to the WooCommerce order).

For the full field-by-field breakdown — and the long list of things the plugin deliberately doesn’t collect — see What Data Is Collected.

Connecting activity to a customer

When a visitor is logged in, their activity is tied to their WordPress account, so it appears on their customer profile. Orders connect a customer to their purchases automatically. Guest activity is still recorded, but profiles are built around your WooCommerce customers and their orders.

Where your data is stored

Everything is written to custom tables in your own WordPress database, alongside the rest of your site. Nothing is sent to an external server or API. For the full privacy picture, see Self-Hosted Data, Privacy & GDPR.

What isn’t tracked

• Logged-in admins — excluded by default, so your own browsing doesn’t skew the numbers. (Pro can optionally include admin sessions, and can filter out bots.)
• Passwords, payment details, and form contents — never recorded. The plugin only logs the page path and the few WooCommerce events above.
• No device, browser, screen, or location profiling — it doesn’t fingerprint the browser, parse the user agent into device/OS, or look up a visitor’s location from their IP. The country shown on a profile comes from the customer’s WooCommerce billing address, not from tracking.

Performance

• No tracking script is added to normal storefront pages, so there’s nothing extra for browsers to download or run.
• Recording a page view is a single, lightweight database write.
• The heavier reports in wp-admin are cached, and their charts are bundled with the plugin rather than loaded from a third-party CDN.