Products
Webtrends Analytics
Issue
What are the advantages of using the v10 tag?
Resolution
Plugins for easy extensibility
Webtrends has created several plugins. More details below.
YouTube Plugin
The YouTube plugin captures data about YouTube videos embedded on a web page, such as plays, pauses, and percentage viewed.
Events tracked by the YouTube plugin:
- Impression events – An event is sent when a page with an embedded YouTube video loads. One event per embedded video is sent.
- Action events – Events are sent when a visitor plays, pauses, resumes, finishes, or selects a frame in a video.
- Progress events – Events are sent when a visitor passes the 25%, 50% and 75% milestones in a video. The Action events for play and finish represent 0% and 100% progress, respectively.
Selector-Based Event Tracking
A very exciting new feature is that using the JQuery type selector based capabilities of the new JS, it is incredibly easy to create events that execute on a wide variety of criteria from document clicks, to off-site clicks to anchor links and ajax calls. Simply add a selector for the object type you want and we can execute our click tracking (aka Webtrends “multitrack”).
“Transform” Events
As part of the JS design, there is now the ability to add parameters to the Webtrends data collection requests before page load, access elements in the DOM, transform the Webtrends request before it is sent, or duplicate the event (for further manipulation).
Performant
This isn’t the first release of Webtrends asynchronous JavaScript tagging, we’ve been using it since 2010 in various versions of our tag. Generally, the actual execution of the JavaScript itself has never been slow on modern hardware but that doesn’t mean that performance can’t be improved upon.
Compact
The tag is much smaller. It minimizes to a very compact size, only a fraction of the 9.x JS tag. The new tag has been optimized to minimize well using the Google Closure Compiler. This means that bandwidth limited devices can download the tag with very little data transfer.
Asynchronous
Traditional JS files are launched from inline “blocking” html which means that as the html page loads, it will wait for the JS to execute before continuing on. This meant it was always best to have the JS execute at the end of a web page to avoid any user experience issues. This isn’t always ideal and could result in some undercounting of statistics too (bounces for one). Asynchronous JS means it will load and execute and allow all other html to continue loading as well.
- Non-blocking, can load anywhere on page
- Potentially higher execution rate In combination with compact size, can make bandwidth limited devices execute with higher accuracy.
- Smaller means faster download, and asynchronous means it can load at the top of the page.