Welcome to your new ActivTrak account! You’re on your way to gaining all sorts of invaluable organizational insights, backed by your very own workforce data. Whether you're on a free trial or paid plan, setting up your ActivTrak account is straightforward with this step-by-step guide.
ActivTrak Academy
Do you prefer self-paced courses or live training? Check out these and other courses in ActivTrak Academy (available with paid plans and free trials).
Contents
- Log in to ActivTrak
- Complete Guided Account Setup
- Deploy ActivTrak Agents
- Create Aliases and Display Names
- Organize Users into Groups
- Classify applications and websites
- Configure Active Time & Passive Time settings
- Configure User Roles & Permissions
- Create Schedules
- Explore Dashboards
- Create shortcuts with Favorites
- Get additional training & support
Log in to ActivTrak
To log on to ActivTrak, visit app.activtrak.com and enter your credentials. Alternatively, SSO and MFA can be enabled.
Complete Guided Account Setup
The first time you access your account, you’ll be prompted to complete our Guided Account Setup. This feature allows you to tailor your account to your organization's use cases and privacy preferences. Your selections will determine which Dashboards are displayed in the left app navigation and the level of data included on those pages.
Deploy ActivTrak Agents
ActivTrak is powered by the Agent — our lightweight software that collects digital workforce activity for analysis in Dashboards. Without at least one deployed Agent, Dashboards will appear empty.
During Guided Account Setup, you will have the option to download the Agent on your own computer and to share the installation file to deploy Agents on other devices. There are multiple methods of deploying ActivTrak Agents. Review the ActivTrak Agent Deployment Guide for detailed instructions on each option.
When you install the Agent on your own device via the Download Agent button, the app detects your workstation’s operating system and automatically installs the appropriate Agent version. When sharing the installation file, you will be prompted to select the operating system for the device where the Agent will be installed.
You can also download and install an Agent anytime from the Admin Panel by clicking the Install/Share Agent File button in Quick Actions at the top of the Dashboard.
Important
Please ensure that you add the ActivTrak Agent to the allowlist(s) of your antivirus and/or firewall to prevent it from being blocked. Failure to do so is one of the major reasons new Users experience Agent issues.
Create Aliases and Display Names
Modify the viewable name of a computer (i.e., Alias) or a User (i.e., Display Name) in the ActivTrak App for easier, cleaner reporting. When the Agent is installed, the data associated with that device will be labeled with the computer's registered name. Creating a computer Alias is helpful when the registered name lacks essential information, such as the User's identity or the device's location.
Similar to computer Aliases, Display Names are helpful when a User’s naming convention does not reflect who they are. When you create a Display Name, it is retroactive and replaces the underlying User name in all ActivTrak Dashboards, resulting in easier readability and quicker identification. Alternatively, a Display Name could be assigned to conceal the User's true identity and anonymize data.
Organize Users into Groups
Organizing Users into Groups ensures accurate reporting and the responsible sharing of employee data. Typically, Groups are aligned with teams within an organization, enabling managers to determine which activities are productive or unproductive, set goals, and assess team health and performance. When inviting Users to access your ActivTrak account, you’ll assign them to Viewable Groups to determine the data they can access. This ensures that employees’ activity data is only visible to the appropriate people, typically their direct manager.
Classify applications and websites
Activity classification is essential to ensuring your Dashboards accurately reflect how Users spend their time. ActivTrak's Intelligent Auto-Classification feature uses crowdsourced data to automatically categorize commonly used websites and applications as either productive or unproductive.
You can override automatic productivity classifications by creating Custom Rules and/or custom categories (e.g., chat & messaging, project management, accounting tools) to meet your organization’s unique requirements. Classifications can be assigned at the Group level to account for differences in roles and responsibilities. For example, social media may be unproductive for the Accounting team, but productive for the Marketing team.
Configure Active Time & Passive Time settings
In ActivTrak, activity time is captured and categorized as either Active or Passive. Active Time includes activities that involve active mouse and keyboard movements (e.g., composing an email). Passive Time includes activities that do not involve mouse and keyboard movements (e.g., watching a video).
Your account defaults to ActivTrak's recommended Active Time and Passive Time durations; however, you can customize these settings to fit your organization's needs.
Configure User Roles and Permissions
Many people in your organization — from team managers and executives to HR and IT leaders — can benefit from the workforce insights provided by ActivTrak. With configurable User Roles and Viewable Groups, you can give each User access to specific insights in the ActivTrak App without compromising employee privacy or granting access to administrative settings in your account.
- User Roles: When inviting Users to your account, you will assign them one of four User Roles: Administrator, Configurator, Power User, or Viewer. Each role can be configured to access the appropriate Dashboards and settings.
- Viewable Groups: Assign Viewable Groups to each User to determine whose data they can see in Dashboards. Users can be part of multiple Groups, making it easy to create cohorts tailored to various needs. For example, you might have a Group for each department within your organization (engineering, sales, finance), viewable to the department head, and separate Groups for smaller teams within a department, viewable to the respective team manager.
Note: Alternative methods are available for stakeholders across your organization to view and utilize ActivTrak's valuable workforce data insights without direct access to the ActivTrak app. They include Insights email subscriptions (available in select plans) and integration with external applications, such as BI tools (available with the ActivConnect API add-on).
Create Schedules
Work Schedules define when employees are expected to be productive during their workday, enabling the monitoring and reporting of schedule adherence. These schedules establish expected start and end times, as well as break periods, to measure how closely team members adhere to their assigned shifts, helping managers identify late arrivals, early departures, and patterns of productive time during scheduled hours.
You can define custom Tracking Schedules to prevent the Agent from collecting User activity data outside of working hours. Unique schedules can be applied to individual Users to align with each employee’s standard working hours.
Explore Dashboards
Now for the fun part—it’s time to explore the ActivTrak App and check out your workforce data!
We recommend starting with our "homepages" located under Home in our navigation bar. These are streamlined Dashboards that simplify workflows and provide key insights at a glance for ActivTrak Users:
Note: Admin Panel, Organization Overview and Activity Dashboard are available in all paid plans and Professional trials. Team Management is available only on select plans.
ActivTrak's Dashboards, powered by either Live Data or Insights, provide comprehensive visibility into workforce productivity and performance through interactive data visualizations. These centralized views consolidate key metrics and analytics from across your organization, enabling you to monitor team activity, identify trends, and make informed, data-driven decisions about your workforce. Dashboard availability varies by plan, with different features and capabilities accessible based on your plan level.
Each Dashboard serves as a focused workspace for specific analytical needs, combining multiple data points and visualizations to tell a complete story about your team's productivity patterns. Whether you're tracking individual performance, analyzing team dynamics, or measuring organizational efficiency, our dashboards transform raw activity data into actionable insights that help you optimize workforce performance and support your employees' success.
For Dashboards using Insights, you can set goals and measure progress toward those goals, giving you clear benchmarks for success. You can also share Insights outside of the ActivTrak app with convenient email subscriptions, making it easy to keep stakeholders informed without requiring them to log into the platform.
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Create shortcuts with Favorites
Save time accessing your most frequently used Dashboards with Favorites. Favorites is a great way for all Users to build out their workflows and customize their in-app experience. Note: Favorites are available only on paid plans and professional trial accounts.
You can add Favorites by hovering over a page name within the left navigation and clicking the star icon to the right of the page name, or clicking Add Favorite at the top of any page.
Note: Each User can create their own Favorites list; your selections will not impact those of other Users.
Get additional training & support
There's a lot to explore in ActivTrak! We are here to support you through every step of your ActivTrak journey.
- Do you need to get up to speed on using ActivTrak to reach your goals? Access a mix of self-paced courses and live training in the ActivTrak Academy. Note: This feature is available only on paid plans and free trials.
- Are you looking for product information and documentation? Our Help Center has it all.
- Want to learn about new product updates? Latest Updates is the go-to place.
- Interested in shaping ActivTrak's future product roadmaps with ongoing feedback? Join our Customer Research Panel.
- Need technical support with your account? Reach out to our amazing Support team.
- Want to be kept informed about ActivTrak's performance and operational status? Visit and subscribe to the ActivTrak Status Page.
- Want to learn more about ActivTrak's security and data privacy safeguards & measures? Visit our Trust Center.
- Interested in workforce productivity research, best practices and trends? Explore our Productivity Lab.
Note: Certain Support plans include customized onboarding with a member of our Customer Success Team. Learn more about ActivTrak's Support plans here.