Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Tracking AJAX and file downloads

Tracking AJAX objects is a new challenge for web analytics. Its tricky to do with tags because the script has to be embedded in the page. Actually, this is true of all file downloads, such as PDF, etc. With Passive Data Capture, these items are easily captured as they are simply more request-responses between the visitor and server.

The other question is how to define them within teh context of Web Analytics. Is refreshing soem objects on the page a new pageview or is it something else? Sometimes it looks like a new pageview to the visitor, so it could be resonably treated as such. However, many pages are simply changing a small icon, such as in a catalogue, which does not really seem like a new pageview.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Get your own data

Recently, we have been approached by a number of companies developing predictive behaviorial analytics engines to improve visitor conversion. Its part of site optimization. It many cases, their prospects use a 3rd party tagging solution and the data they need is probably being collected already, at aleast for off-line analysis. However, it turns out that these companies are reluctant to provide the raw data back to the client. It is not clear whether this is because the are not set up to do it or they want to develop this space themselves and this is a way to keep the competitors out! Either way, it is another reason to get your own data in-house. As web activity becomes less of a novelty and is more an integral part of the business, it becomes more imprortant to be able to join web traffic data to other sales and marketing data. Thsi is difficult to do if the data is in someone else's database and they are only allowing selective access.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Packet Sniffing - Analytics without site changes

We knew that collecting web analytics data with Passive Data Capture (Packet Sniffing) instead of tags does not require any changes to the website or servers, but we did not understand how important this was until one of our clients told us that they had spent over $1M tagging their site! Why? The tag javascript is complex and they have code embedded in the pages as well, but not $1M complex.

The reason is quite simple, tags change the operational site. First, they had to buy and configure a sophisticated test system. Then they had to implement against the test system which of course, was not exactly the same as real visitor traffic. Then there was the nail-biting rollout which immediatley had problems with real traffic. Every tweak and change had the potential to stop a huge e-commerce site, so there was a long test, QA and approval cycle for each change. Add to this the fact that marketing kept coming up with new requirements and the development and support kept ballooning.

With Passive Data Capture (Packet Sniffing), they can now implement and test against the real traffic immediately without fear of breaking the site. Because there are no nasty surprises on rollout and the buesiness risk is far less, the update cycle is massively reduced. Because we can emulate the logs that were coming from the in-house tag server, they can continue to use he existing analytics package. Now there are no tags on the site, no 30K file downloaded each visit to slow down pages and present a security risk and much faster turn-around for marketing changes. Now if they had only done it that way in the first place . . .