Content Groups: Beyond Space

October 24, 2008 ghebbron — 6 comments

Content groups are probably the most common dynamic parameters I see people setting up when tagging their site. By dynamic parameters I mean something the logging script doesn’t grab automatically and you have to actually put some effort into. Yes WT.cg_n and WT.cg_s are standard parameters not like DCSext, and Content Group reporting is in the standard report package. But defining and then implementing content groups is a very non-standard process.

The recommended practice for defining Content Groups, Sub Groups and how they will be organized is to use your site map or navigation tree. Your average to medium-sized web site will have at least a two tier navigation represented by drop down, fold out, or sub menus. So if you’re lucky enough to have a typical web site you can pretty much just replicate this structure. If you’re really lucky (or rather if the site developers are lucky) you can even leach the values you are assigning to WT.cg_n and WT.cg_s from the little Java Script function that builds your navigational menu or bread crumb navigation.

Failing that you can always try stripping your content group names from the URL structure, maybe your content group name always appears in the first directory of the path and sub group the second. If the values in your URL look messy or are just numbers, you can always use a look up table to translate them into nice readable group names for your reports during analysis (good luck getting your head round that second line).

_tag.WT.cg_n=document.location.path.substring(1, (document.location.path.indexOf("/",1)-1));
_tag.WT.cg_s=document.location.path.substring
((document.location.path.indexOf("/",1)+1),
(document.location.path.indexOf("/",
(document.location.path.indexOf("/",1)+1))-1));

But what if your site doesn’t have a typical structure? Maybe you have shared content across groups? Maybe you have a more liquid and dynamic site design that’s using stateless technologies like Flash or AJAX? Or maybe your site’s just a mess? In these cases you’re going to have to think beyond navigational structure and site maps, you gotta get Zen.

Remember _n and _s are just parameters, boxes you can put any value in, so why constrain yourself to space? Why not time? I know dwell time is recorded and reported on as standard, but I’m talking about segmenting time over content…

So the time the visitor session started is stored to the millisecond (number of milliseconds since midnight of January 1, 1970) in the WT_FPC cookie, go ahead and have a look… its right there see? ‘:ss=#############’. OK so you write some script that grabs this value from the cookie every time you’re making a logging request. Now get the current date in milliseconds, ok subtract your big number (now) from the start session date, round your answer up to say a minute interval and stick the value in WT.cg_n. Do this for every page/action you log… the script might look something like this:

//Check if WT_FPC cookie has been set and if so retreave it
var cookie=this.dcsGetCookie("WT_FPC");
if (cookie){
//Extract the Session start time from the cookie ss value
var StartTime = parseInt(this.dcsGetCrumb(cookie,"ss"));
//Get the current time
var NowDate=new Date();
//Add time zone off sets
var adjTime=(NowDate.getTimezoneOffset()*60000)+(_tag.timezone*3600000);
NowDate.setTime(NowDate.getTime()+adjTime);
var NowTime=parseInt(NowDate.getTime());
//Subtract the session start time for now.
//Round to nearest whole minute and set content group value.
_tag.WT.cg_n=Math.round((NowTime-StartTime)/(60000));
} else {
//Or asume that since there is no cookie we are in the first minute of the visit?
_tag.WT.cg_n=0;
}

What your now logging is minute intervals for every page view, so now when you lookat your pages by content group drill down report you will be seeing the most popular pages across visits within the first, second, third and on minutes of visits to your site. This will give you an indication of how quickly visitors spread out from your Home Page into your site and how long its taking them to get to your key business and interest pages.

Spacetime

CATEGORIES: Best Practices Marketing Optimization