New Version of Tag Builder Available

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You Asked, We Acted.
Today we launched a few improvements to WebTrends Tag Builder. Based on input from this blog we were able to quickly make some changes to a couple of issues you called out.

•   We didn’t update referrer appropriately when off-site links were clicked. Now these are passed with every off-site click.
•   We were a little too picky about file extensions. File extensions you specify on the Click Event Tracking tab are now case-insensitive.

Auto Detection of Paid Search for AdWords
Are you interested in tracking paid search for Google AdWords in your WebTrends reporting without having to deal with additional setup? Now our tag detects if referrals from Google originate from paid or organic placements without requiring you to set an additional parameter. This does require that you have the “Destination URL Autotagging” option enabled in your AdWords account. We will keep you posted as we automatically detect other engines in the future.

Integrated Tagging for Quantcast Publisher
Tag Builder now includes Quantcast as an option when you are setting up your WebTrends tagging. Quantcast is a no-charge solution that provides access to detailed geographic, demographic and lifestyle data about visitors to your site (including age, race, sex, income range, children status and other sites visited).

With WebTrends and Quantcast you can:
•    Compare your traffic acquisition strategy to competing sites
•    Get insight into how your competitors are getting traffic
•    Use insight on high-value populations to move ad dollars
•    Adjust your ad buy mid-stream – see what demographics are responding

For more details check out the Quantcast site.

Please keep the feedback coming. We are listening! Whether you are a software or On Demand customer, we’re always working hard to improve your experience with WebTrends.  Let us know how we’re doing -  from within the products,  here on the blog, user forums, Twitter or contact any of us directly.

  • http://gotanalytics.blogspot.com Chris Grant

    Eric, thank you (you and the team) for this batch of goodies! We’re going to try out the Quantcast stuff ASAP. It’s exactly what we need. And thank whoever-it-was for the good info page over on Quantcast.com.

  • http://gotanalytics.blogspot.com Chris Grant

    p.s. “you asked we acted” department – when are you gonna activate the subdomain blogs.webtrends.com (note plural) so dopes like me on autopilot stop getting errors!

  • http://www.nationwide.com Bryan Cristina

    I still think the tool should, in addition to sound code that doesn’t trigger warnings all over the place (semicolons and such), I’m sure most people would appreciate being able to craft the style of the Offsite and Form tags.

    Because for people who have to use or decide to use hit filters to build profiles, they’d have to add in all the offsite domains based on the way it builds it now (it goes to http://www.theothersite.com/page.html). I’d much rather have it as something like /offsiteLink/theothersite.com/page.html because I can see them in my existing profile.. I can strip them out if I desire (filter out), and I can find them easily with a search if they all have that convention.

    Same with form buttons. Having the same URL as a regular page but simply sticking Form Button: into the page title is useless, especially based on the odd way WebTrends handles unique titles with non-unique URLs. And I need the ability to strip out form buttons from the path reports (some people still want them :) , since honestly I think it destroys and confuses what really happens on a page.

    I’ve rewritten it myself to pass things the way I wanted, but I’m sure others are scared to touch the code or won’t even bother doing it, which I would think worsens their experience.

  • Josh Angott

    Bryan, I go through the same thing here. I’ve altered the way these come through in the tag and whenever there is a new version of the tag, we have to work our changes back into the code.

    The same thing with the whole dcsMultiTrack function and the advanced event handlers that call it. In my opinion, out of the box, it’s broken. So we have our way of doing it (which I believe would be better for everyone). These changes also need to be merged back into any changes made to the tagbuilder tag.

    Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there’s really a ‘best’ solution for everyone and allowing one to specify how the offsite and and formButton events are tracked would be far more complicated for the tagbuilder than the current method.

  • Eric Rickson

    Bryan and Josh – This is great stuff. Would either of you be open to having a quick chat with me next week to dig a little deeper on this topic? Please shoot me an email at eric.ricksonATwebtrends.com if you are interested.

  • Josh Angott

    Eric, I would be glad to disucss the topic further. Email sent.

    Overall, I think that launching the TagBuilder is a great step and I am happy to see that it is being actively improved.

    I’m also going to back-track a little on my “broken dcsMultiTrack” comment above. I believe the way I’ve changed it is better, but it’s possible that there are situations in which the ‘out of the box’ method is better.

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