A developer's guide to web analytics – new post every 1st & 3rd Tuesday
Articles that explain general concepts and principles behind web analytics and Adobe Analytics
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The cool thing about Analytics, from the point of view of a developer: once you have set it up, it is completely maintenance-free! Fire and forget! Or is it? The truth is that a) "once you have set it up" is not the way I would describe Analytics (or other things like targeting, personalisation, testing, …
(I mentioned two weeks ago that I sometimes blog because I want to learn and/or remember things. This is one of those articles.) Whether you are a regular reader or just generally interested, I'm sure you know that most (if not all) analytics tools these days work by sending "tracking calls", "hits", "beacons", or whatever …
There are tools out there that find bogus links on your site, and some even try to find links outside your site that point to nirvana. But your friendly marketer likely wants to have better data than that, so she asks you to build tracking for 404 pages. Now what? Let me explain, both for …
I am no lawyer, and I do not want to go into any legal or even ethical or moral aspects of EU privacy law. Let's just say this for our American friends: people in the EU do not like to know they're being marketed to. Mostly. They also fear Google more than their own government, …
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Adobe Analytics has always had a feature that allowed you to dynamically set the Report Suite ID (rsid). It works with a list of domains, matched against the current domain automatically. See dynamic accounts in the Marketing Cloud Help. Nevertheless, traditionally, people have built their own code to set s_account before loading the s_code.js file. …
Who here can explain to me what exactly it means to set the "Remember this value for" setting of a Data Element in DTM to anything else but "Page View"? I can confidently tell you that right now, I have no idea. Which is of course a perfect excuse to a) find out and b) …
In a meeting a couple of months ago, André Urban (a seasoned colleague of mine) and I got into a sudden and unexpected argument about when exactly s.doPlugins is called. I was convinced it was called as a result of calling either s.t() or s.tl(), while he says it was also called everytime a visitor clicks …
Absolutely nothing? This article started as a side note in the article about delayed page load tracking, but I feel it deserves a bit more space. Side notes are so easily over-looked! And when they are, they wither away, hidden in the cracks of our memories, obscured by bigger things, better things, things that demand …
Continue reading Direct Call Rules – what are they good for?
Some time ago I wrote an article in which I dreamt of having some sort of test-driven development capability in online marketing tools. At the time, I said the vendors had to chime in, building hooks, frameworks or APIs into their systems so users and consultants would be able to be test-driven. I had discussions …
Today, I'd like to tell you about a little gotcha I ran into. If you have ever worked with Omniture SiteCatalyst Adobe Analytics before, you will have come across the spectacularly useful s.doPlugins() callback. The doPlugins callback is called every time the Analytics Javascript code has almost finished its job and is just about to …
