Category — SDC & data collection

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!

The length of a visit (in terms of time) is one of the most unsatisfactory web analytics statistics no matter what analytics product you use.

One obvious reason is that you can’t really correlate the length of time with actual visitor attention, even if you do have good numbers about how long the site was on the screen. The less obvious reason is that the numbers just aren’t very good to begin with. But if you really want to know how long people spent on a page for a single page visit, you might want to look at the following “pulse” code.

Javascript analytics tags like WebTrends’ SDC tags generally don’t track error pages, i.e. 404s (page not found), 500’s (server errors), and so forth. Server log files do. Most people accept the absence of error tracking as one of the tradeoffs of using tagging, outweighed by tagging’s many other advantages.

It’s actually easy to track error pages even if you tag your pages. It’s done by getting your site’s server to return a tagged page whenever one of these client or server errors happens.

If you keep up with web analytics news, you may or may not know about the recent fuss over the behavior of a free, widely-used virus-protection program from the company AVG.

Just released: http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com

TagMagic. Extremely cool.

Allows you to create an SDC tag that has advanced features appropriate to your situation. Read the help screen, click on all the little question mark icons, and in general be sure know what you’re doing.