Tracking Visitors in a Rich Media World, Part I: Tracking

March 9, 2009 ghebbron — 1 comment

With broadband now common place in the home, Web Developers are using more and more Rich Media content in their websites. The sinus and flowing interfaces of applications built in technologies such as AJAX, Flash, and SilverLight are replacing ‘blocky’ single state HTML pages. How do we track visitors in these new technologies, and how will we redefine the page view to reflect these fluid interactions?

Part I: Tracking

Let us first address the fundamental problem of issuing logging requests from the client side to our SDC server (web server log files will be no use to us here) from within these technologies, as it is perhaps the most straight forward of the two questions we will address here.

The gap we must bridge is that between our application and the WebTrends logging JavaScript, our end goal being a call to the DCSMultiTrack function… used to trigger subsequent logging requests to an SDC server so that we might capture events that occur after the initial logging request that is made by the script when a page is loaded. These include client-side mouse events (clicks on links), form events, and interaction with embedded objects such as our rich media applications.

The function takes paired values as arguments:

	dcsMultiTrack('name1','value1','name2','value2',...)

All arguments are JavaScript strings which must be enclosed in quotes. The first part of the pair is the parameter name which must be of the form ‘object.name’ where ‘object’ is the name of one of three pre-defined custom objects: WT, DCS, DCSext. And ‘name’ – The property name of the custom object (for WT and DCS these are reserved names). The second part of the pair is the parameter value.
Note the all initial parameter assignments from the initial page load remain unchanged in the triggered request unless overridden by parameter values passed to DCSMultiTrack.

DCSMultiTrack will act as a bridge for us between our Web technology and JavaScript since most client side languages can utilize or make calls to JavaScript functions directly or indirectly. What we record with these DCSMultiTrack requests however we must define ourselves. How do we designate page views and parameter values that will give us a wide enough data set to fully understand how our visitors navigate these technologies.

However it is sometimes the case that from some technologies we are unable to make a call to JavaScript or in some environments even execute JavaScript. One example of this would be RSS feeds where sites content or some other kind of informational stream is downloaded directly from a web server into desktop or third party web based aggregator. We will need to combine a variety of different technologies and reporting approaches to give us encompassing view of RSS utilization, from subscription to consumption.

When do I make my Send call? In call these Rich Media Technologys yes we can make logging requests but when? And what do we put in them? What consitutes as a page view in an interface with no pages. This is a question we will attempt to answer at our Engage 09 Workgroup.

CATEGORIES: Events Industry Perspectives