The Incredible Editable SDC Tag

Applies to Software, On Demand

If you’ve had the opportunity to take a look under the hood of your SDC page tag (and you understand javascript) then you should be pleasantly surprised at how readable the SDC tag is. Take a look at almost any other tool and you’ll find an obfuscated mess. There is not a chance that you could modify how those work. But the SDC tag? Go ahead and hack it up to your heart’s content! (Sidenote: This points to a fundamental difference between WebTrends and most other tools: WebTrends wants you to customize, to make it work just how you want it to work. The price is that you can screw things up monumentally, but if you don’t have a cookie cutter site then why would you want a cookie cutter analytics tool?)

There are probably some WebTrends’ Insiders who are breaking out in a cold sweat after reading that. In the past I have been discouraged by WT from messing with the code. Talk of upgrades and difficulty of support were bandied around, and ignored by me. Just try to segregate your additions and comment your modifications and you’ll be fine. The code is pretty mature and it doesn’t tend to change much from version to version so additions and modifications are usually fairly easy to port to a new version of the tag.

That said, it must be noted that WT just rolled out http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com. This is a nifty new tool that will create customized code that contains only what you need it to contain. The code it puts out has also been completely re-written from the previous standard WT code. It is still readable, but now it’s all object oriented. Very fancy, and it requires slightly more sophisticated javascript knowledge if you want to customize it without making a mess of the whole thing.

So anyway, what are some common customizations? Here are a few simple ones:

• Translate some sort of information on your page into a standard WT variable. There are a bunch of ways to do this that don’t involve modifying the Javascript, but sometimes it’s easiest to just say WT.xyz = myVariable in the code. That way you can add all sorts of If..Then’s and such to get it just right.
• Modify the page title. Many sites have very useless or repetitive title tags. Writing a bit of Javascript to pull actual useful information into the WT.ti tag can make your reports much more readable. Examples include stripping out your company name if it appears in every single title tag, replacing the title with a main header from the page body, or parsing the URL and extracting a useful page title from that.
• Pull in information from 3rd party iframes on your page. These are starting to become pretty common as sites contract with other companies to provide services or content. Examples of these 3rd party services include product reviews, FAQs, maps and news. Typically information in these iframes isn’t available to the WT tag because they often load after the tag fires. What to do? Write some javascript that delays the tag firing until the iframes are loaded and you’ve got the information you need from them. (This can be tricky because you don’t want to miss short page views that are over before the delay is up, but a smart javascripter can make sure the tag fires almost all the time.)

How have you modified the WT tag?

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