While going over my Traffic Sources reports recently, I realized that I had a problem with how my referrers were reported. Not a problem with bad data coming into SiteCatalyst, like the recent issue I fixed regarding the Google Plus referrers, but this was a problem with the Referrers and Referring Domains reports themselves.

Both reports are working as they were designed, but the problem is that both reports are on opposite ends of the spectrum from one another. I feel that at times the Referrers report gives me too much information, while the Referring Domains report doesn’t give me enough. I need a something a bit more in the middle.

Here’s an example of the problem. Checking the Referring Domain report in SiteCatalyst, this is a snippet of what I see:

I can see that some of my visitors came from Google, and some from Yahoo, and that’s all this report tells me. When I see something like that, I start to wonder which sections of the referring site lead to the visitors deciding to come to my site. Well, the first thing I could do in an attempt to answer my question would be to click the magnifying glass icon next to each line item in the Referring Domains report to get a quick view of what referrers specifically mades up that value. Unfortunately the little popup window doesn’t break out the referrers in any kind of a useful way, and I can’t do anything with that popup report myself because there is no export option in that window, so that option’s out. I could do a standard sub-relation breakdown of the two reports, then export the results into Excel, then do some sorting and filtering and could probably get the answer I need for a single Referring Domain value in roughly 5 to 10 minutes. But then I’m stuck having to go back and do that whole process again for the other Referring Domains. This method could end up taking a while, so this option is also out. I’m sure I could whip something up in Data Warehouse, but I won’t see that report anytime soon either. I could go set up a ton of Processing Rules, but that won’t work because I would end up using all the rules just to help me populate one variable. So how do I get the report I need? Looks like it time for some more s_code magic.

And voilà. I give to you the s.getFullReferringDomains plugin. What this will do is look at that referrer value and grab not only the domain name, but any subdomains it may have as well. This uses the same s.linkInternalFilters values that you’ve already set up to ensure that this will only set its value when there is an external referrer. So now I will get a better, quicker, easier look at my referring domains:

All that needs to be done is to choose an unused variable, and call the plugin from it. This should be placed inside of the doPlugins section of the s_code.js file.

s.eVar1 = s.getFullReferringDomains();

Then just add the plugin itself to the plugins section of your s_code file.

/*
 * Get Full Referring Domains
 */
s.getFullReferringDomains=new Function(""
+"var s=this,dr=window.document.referrer,n=s.linkInternalFilters.spli"
+"t(',');if(dr){var r=dr.split('/')[2],l=n.length;for(i=0;i<=l;i++){i"
+"f(r.indexOf(n[i])!=-1){r='';i=l+1;}}return r}");

One last thing I like to do with this new report is to go into the Report Suite manager in the Admin Console, and move it to the Traffic sources menu. This way all of your referrer related reports will all live in one spot. It looks like it should have lived there all along.

enjoy!

Recently I was looking through some traffic sources reports in SiteCatalyst, and I noticed something odd. In my Referrers report I had a bunch of different referring URL’s that were all coming from Google Plus, all going to the exact same page on my site, but each referring URL was listed separately. Taking a closer look, I noticed that each referring URL contained some unique query string values, and my Referrers report was quickly getting filled up with a lot of redundant links.

I was curious to learn about what was going on, so using Chrome I logged into my Google Plus account looking for a link to click. I found a link one of my friends shared, clicked it, and then checked what the referring link to that site was.

Next I did the same thing in Firefox. I clicked the exact same link as before shared by the same person, and then checked that referrer.

Finally I tried clicking the exact same link for a third time, this time trying it in Safari.

The exact same link, shared by the exact same person, going to the exact same page, from the exact same Google Plus account, but three different referring URL values. It looked like Google Plus was using a unique URL value for each browser. But wait, I had a ton of different values in my Referrers report so that couldn’t be it. Still using Chrome I went back and clicked on the same link I’ve been using.

Another unique referring URL. As Google Plus usage beings to increase, I can see this becoming a big problem. I needed to find an easy way to clean up my Google Plus referrers.

Looking at each referring link I see that there are two parameters that are unique each time, n= and usg=. I could probably keep testing and find out what these two parameters meant, but I doubt I’ll need them. I just need to know that the visitor came from Google Plus. But looking closer at the referrer value I can see something else that could be useful. The url= parameter contains the page that the link was headed to, and that could be helpful to have. So if I had a way to just drop off everything from that Google Plus referring URL query string except for the url= value, that would give me what I’m looking for. I would now be able to clean up my Referrers report by removing all the redundant links, and as a bonus I would be able to tell which page of my site attracted the most attention on Google Plus just by looking at those referrers. So how do I do it?

All it takes is a little bit of code dropped into the s_code.js file and my problem is solved.

The best part is that there is no set up required. I wanted to keep it really simple so I made sure that there’s nothing that needs to be configured. Just paste this plugin code right next to all of your other plugins, and all of your messy Google Plus referring URLs will get cleaned up automagically!

/*
 * Clean up Google Plus referrer values
 */
s.cleanGP=new Function("var s=this,a=document.referrer,b='plus.url.go"
+"ogle.com',c,d,e,g,i=0,p,referrer;if(a&&a.split('/')[2]==b){c=a.spli"
+"t(/[\?|&]/);d=c[0].length;e=c[0].lastIndexOf('/');g=d>e?c[0].substr"
+"ing(0,e+1):c[0];for(i=0;i<=c.length;i++)'url'==c[i].substring(0,3)&"
+"&(p='?'+unescape(c[i]),i=c.length+1);g&&(this.s.referrer=p?g+p:g);}"
+"return this.s.referrer")();

enjoy!

Recently I was speaking to someone who was in the process of creating an tablet experience for their visitors. At one point they asked the question “of my iPad visitors, how do I find out in what format do they view my site the most in, landscape or portrait?”. I started going through all of the reports in SiteCatalyst and tried to find the answer, but that information just was not available. So I decided to whip a little bit of code that would figure this out for us. I call this the screenOrientation plug-in.

Basically what this will do is it will check to see in what position the mobile visitor is viewing the site in, whether they are viewing the site in a portrait or a landscape view when the page loads, and capture that value into a SiteCatalyst variable.

To implement this plug-in you first need to take this code, and add it to your s_code file near the rest of your plug-ins.

function screenOrientation(){switch(window.orientation){case 0:case 180:return("Portrait");break;case 90:case -90:return("Landscape");}window.scroll(0,0)}

Next in the do_plugins section of the s_code file, add the call to the plug-in to what ever SiteCatalyst variable you want this data captured in. In the example here you can see I am capturing it in s.prop1

s.prop1=screenOrientation();

Thats all it takes. Once the code is implemented, if the device does not have an orientation value the variable will not capture anything, but if the visitor is on a mobile device with an orientation value, the value of Landscape or Portrait will be captured on each page load. You will end up with a report that looks something like this:



To make it easier to access the report I also moved it into the Mobile report menu by using the customize menus option in the admin console of SiteCatalyst.

enjoy!

One of the most common things I get asked to track are specific links on the website. Typically to do that I would use a custom link tracking function. This typically involves adding a large chunk of JavaScript code to each link, or adding a function to your s_code file and then calling that function using an onClick function added directly to the link. That methodology works fine, and I’ve been doing it forever. But that means working with IT to add more code to your pages, something I want to try to avoid as much as possible. So how can we make the implementation of our link tracking quicker and use less code? If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’re going to use some jQuery.

For more information how to do this, please read the full article Custom Link Tracking in Omniture using jQuery.

For more information on website optimization solutions, please visit Keystone Solutions.

Today I show you how to setup and use contextData variables with processing rules in SiteCatalyst 15.

Enjoy.

Here is a quick look at what can be done with and how to set up processing rules in SiteCatalyst 15.

Enjoy.

Recently someone had asked the question, how do I capture a query string parameter that’s on referring URL? We all know how to grab a query string parameter from the current page URL by using the getQueryParam SiteCatalyst plug-in, but most people don’t know that plug-in can be used to get a query string parameter from the referring URL as well. I once had a real unique implementation that was not using that plug-in and needed to capture that value. I wanted to keep the implementation really light so I decided to give it a try using a smaller bit of code. I broke out a little JavaScript magic to see if I could make it happen simpler than using that plug-in. Turns out it’s not too difficult to accomplish, in fact I got it down to just a single line of code.

function getRefQueryParam(a){a=a.replace(/[\[]/,"\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\]");a=RegExp("[\\?&]"+a+"=([^&#]*)").exec(document.referrer);return a==null?"":a[1]};

Its a little function called getRefQueryParam. To use it just place that code in your s_code file, and then call it with the name of the query string parameter you want to capture. In this example I want to capture the value of the parameter forumID= from the referring URL and record it in s.prop1.

s.prop1=getRefQueryParam('forumID');

With a little JavaScript goodness it is an easy value to capture.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: I have a much better way to block the Google Web Preview bot from being tracked as a visitor in SiteCatalyst. The original solution I had posted here, required a block of code to be placed at the very top of the s_code file, and your account ID was put into a function call. Then when the s_code was fired, a function would first check the user agent of the visitor to see if it was the Google Web Preview bot, and if so then swap out the account ID with a blank value. The SiteCatalyst code would still fire, but when Omniture received the image request it would get discarded because of the missing account ID. The more I thought about this I figured there had to be a better way. No reason to execute all the s_code javascript and fire off the beacon call when I don’t want that visitor (Google) to be tracked. So after a little brainstorming I came up with a new and improved way to do this. Now when the user agent is determined to be the Google Web Preview bot, then the SiteCatalyst code is prevented from even firing (how it should have been originally). Even better, this can now be done by simply adding a tiny bit of code to the plugin’s section of your s_code file, right next to all your other plugin code. Thats it. No other changes need to happen. No code at the top of the page, no adding calls to functions in the account variable. Just cut, paste, and done.

Here is the code. Just add this right next to all of your other plugins.

/*
 *  Block the Google Web Preview Bot from firing SiteCatalyst code
 */
if(s.u.toLowerCase().indexOf('google web preview')!=-1){s.t=function(){}}

If you are using the original version from below make sure you remove it. And as with any code, make sure you fully test it before deploying to a live site.
~kevin

Google Instant Preview, designed to show you a visual preview of your search results, rolled out in early November 2010. You now have the ability to click a small magnifying glass icon next to each search result to get a snapshot of what the page looks like.


Seems like a pretty helpful feature, but how do they do it? Well it would appear that Google has a new spider that crawls the web and takes snapshots of each page in its results. In order for them to get an accurate look at what the page looks like, this new bot needs to able to execute JavaScript. Here is the problem. Since it is executing JavaScript that means it is also firing off the SiteCatalyst code and is being counted as another visitor and is registering page views.

How can you tell if this new Google Web Preview bot hit your site? If you are capturing User Agent you can see it show up in that report:


NOTE: If you are not capturing user agent and would like to, a super simple way would be to use the SiteCatalyst Dynamic Variable functionality and include s.eVarX=”D=User-Agent”; in your s_code.js file. Just insert the number of the eVar you would like to use (a s.prop would work too) and you are all set.

Another way to see if you are being affected with spider traffic in your report suite from the Google Preview Bot would be to check out a Browser report (Visitor Profile > Technology > Browsers) and filter it to only show visitors using Safari 3.1 and then trend it.

We can see that this report suite has recorded about an additional 15,000 visitors over the last week that is just attributed to Safari 3.1. Checking the User Agent we saw earlier, the Google Web Preview bot is registering itself as Safari 3.1.

Now that we can see that the Google Web Preview bot is having an effect on our traffic how do we get rid of it? We could block that bot in our robots.txt file, but I like having that additional functionality available for my visitors in the Google search results. I just don’t want it to execute my SiteCatalyst code. Well here is how to do it.

I call this my bot detection code (real catchy title, right?). I currently have it just set to look for the Google Web Preview bot, but it could easily be modified to exclude other bots that can execute JavaScript. Here is how you implement it. In your s_code file, at the top you will have a s_account variable that contains your report suite id. It will look something like this:

var s_account="dead"

To implement the bot detection code you will want to change that line to include the function call. It should look like this:

var s_account=botCheck("dead")

Pretty simple so far, right? We just added the function call and included our report suite id in it. Next we have a block of code that needs to be added to the plug-ins section of the s_code file:

function botCheck(b){var c=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(),a="";a+=c.indexOf("google web preview")!=-1?"":b;return a};

And that’s all there is to it. So how does it work you ask? What it does is it removes your report suite id if it is the Google Web Preview bot that is accessing the page. The SiteCatalyst code will still fire off, but it will not include the report suite id so it will be discarded by SiteCatalyst and it will not affect your metrics.

Want to see it in action? I thought you’d never ask! Check out the page http://webanalyticsland.com/test.php. On this page I have a basic SiteCatalyst implementation, one line of code that displays your user agent, and then I print the results of the SiteCatalyst debugger right to the screen. Opening this page in a standard Firefox browser we can see that the SiteCatalyst code has fired off properly, it has displayed the correct user agent and the report suite id is contained within the image request string.

So far so good. Using the User Agent switcher plug-in for Firefox, we can switch out user agent to the one that we found in the SiteCatalyst report to mimic the Google Web Preview bot.

We can now see that when we use that bot’s user agent string, the report suite id is missing from the image request call. Any action that happens now will not be recorded in my report suite, and when SiteCatalyst receives this request it will be discarded. I’ve had this running for a few days now and have not found any issues, but since this is a pretty new chunk of code be sure to test it out before using it on your production site.

Enjoy!

A Solution Design Document is a complete blueprint of your web analytics implementation. It outlines where every variable is set and why. It can really be a lifesaver. You should start keeping a solution design document as soon as you begin your implementation. Every time you add a prop, an evar, an event or any other variable, make sure you add it in there. Every time you make a change to your implementation, make note of it in there. It’s an easy place to go to see what variables are being used for what where they are being set and which ones are still available.

“But do I really need to keep track of everything to that level of detail, just checking the Admin console has been working well for us.” Well have you ever opened a report and find information there that shouldn’t be there?

How did that get in there? It’s being set somewhere in our implementation, but where? What page sets that variable? What function could set it? A quick check of our solution design document and we can see every place were that particular prop is set, well where they should be set. If one of your developers decided to get the implementation and set a variable in a non traditional way, it can be a real nightmare trying to figure out what was done. Without that you could waste a lot of time hunting through code searching for where a random variable is being set.

Here is an example spreadsheet that you can use as a basis to start your Solution Design Document:
Sample Solution Design Document

If you have a large team that all have their hands in your web analytics implementation, it may be beneficial to could place the solution design document in a location where the different members of your team can have access and add to it, like for example Google Docs or some other shared folder or public drive.

Enjoy!