A New User Experience, Part 1 (of 5): Introduction to Tag Builder 3.0
March 31st, 2009 by Justin GarrityA power user of WebTrends recently told me that, “With WebTrends, you are only limited by your imagination.” For our advanced users, this is true. They see the power of the platform, get in there, and access all sorts of custom controls and configurations made available to them. However, exposing these power features to our power users has come at a cost, the overall user experience. When I joined the WebTrends team, my mandate was to dramatically improve the user experience of our products for all users. I am proud to announce the first manifestation of this initiative.
Previous Tag Builder - Version 2.2
Enter Tag Builder – the starting point for our User Experience (UX) transformation. Tag Builder is a great power user mini-app. It allows a user to quickly put together a powerful custom javascript tag for visitor/behavior tracking. These tags work for both the Analytics and Warehouse platforms and even includes options for Ad Director and Quantcast tracking (2.2 release feature) all within one custom javascript file. Tag Builder, because of its small size, allowed us to do a complete overhaul on the user interface while keeping the engine that builds the actual tag on the backend the same. We even included a link to the 2.2 version of TagBuilder so users who rely on Tag Builder can access the previous version during the transition so they can compare the javascript files for their own curiosity and quality assurance.
New Tag Builder - Version 3.0
The next four articles will walk through the detailed changes manifested in the new Tag Builder, the methodologies that led up to them, and what this means for the larger WebTrends product line.
Try out the new WebTrends Tag Builder yourself. And let us know what you think.
Tags: Best Practices, Design, tag builder, usability, User Experience, UX, WebTrends
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April 1st, 2009 at 1:50 am
Well done guys!
The interface is a good example of “form” best practices: clear interface, contextual help, selected fields being highlighted, clear error messages,…
Much better than the previous one – make the process much clearer.
Will probably plan upgrade of our tags from v8.0.3 to latest one – too many cool features
Cheers,
Michaël
http://www.kaizen-analytics.com
April 1st, 2009 at 11:20 am
I just completed my first interaction with the new tagbuilder site. I thought it was much easier to use than the previous version. I was able to build my tag in just a few minutes without handholding by our WT account guys Tom S. and Dave J. (I’m sure they are happy the site is so easy to use too). Thank you for providing such great tools!
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Hey guys,
Just wondering what’s up with the tagbuilder app. No matter if you check or uncheck the option to use vt_sid vs vtid, it will ALWAYS use vtid. Is that some sort of bug or the way it’s supposed to be?
Using the new .js, I’m not getting any first party cookie/sid information set.
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Thanks Bryan.
To clarify for customers who haven’t seen these parameters before, they are used only for WebTrends Marketing Warehouse and Visitor Intelligence
WT.vt_sid
Our data collection server now constructs the vt_sid from the first party cookie and session start time. This approach allows us to track across domains much like in Analytics, as long as the same dcsid is used on both domains.
New optional parameters for Warehouse Visitor ID
The current tag builder tag ( v2.1 and up) populates two new parameters: vtvs (session start time stamp) and vtid (visitor id). By default the tag will populate vtid with the co_f value. However, there is an override option in tag builder to set vtid based on a parameter or cookie. This is very useful if you want to use a different method for visitor identification in Marketing Warehouse than in Analytics while sharing the same dcsid. By default these parameters aren’t used for anything, but we have added new options for visitor identification for our Marketing Warehouse that lets you choose from the default vt_sid, the new vtid, or a user defined parameter. Pretty flexible stuff.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Thanks for the clarification, Eric.
Maybe it would be a good idea to show an example string of what a CORRECT implementation of WebTrends code should be sending back to the WebTrends server with the GET .gif command. I see what’s in there (the dcsuri, dcssip, tz, vtid, etc) but I’m not sure everything that should be in there is either there or in the correct format.