15 for 15: Code version H.23.2 released

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I wasn’t sure whether this post should be part of our “15 for 15″ series, since (as you may have noticed), code ver­sion H.23.2 is avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst 14 (as well as Site­Cat­a­lyst 15). There are some ele­ments of this code release that you can use right now, regard­less of the Site­Cat­a­lyst ver­sion that you are using. I want to make sure you are aware of the new func­tion­al­ity intro­duced in this JavaScript code release, so you can decide whether or not your orga­ni­za­tion should con­sider upgrad­ing to this lat­est code version.

(NOTE: April 2011 also brought us new App­Mea­sure­ment releases for Flash, Java, and .NET; I won’t cover those here, but the release notes are avail­able within SiteCatalyst.)

As I men­tioned, this JavaScript code release was tied to the Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 launch, so many of the fea­tures that it intro­duces are spe­cific to that ver­sion of Site­Cat­a­lyst. How­ever, you are wel­come to begin using H.23.2 code even if you are not using Site­Cat­a­lyst 15. It works great with Site­Cat­a­lyst 14, too! Here we go…

  • Sup­port for con­text­Data vari­ables. This is a new fea­ture avail­able within Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 which allows the devel­oper to name his/her own Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables if desired. For exam­ple, in addi­tion to the tra­di­tional imple­men­ta­tion, which looks like this:

    s.pageName="Book Page: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
    s.eVar1="J.K. Rowling"
    s.eVar2="Books"

    …your devel­oper could do some­thing much more intu­itive in his/her mind, like this:

    s.contextData['page']="Book Page: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
    s.contextData['author']="J.K. Rowling"
    s.contextData['category']="Books"

    The trained Site­Cat­a­lyst admin can then map the “friendly” vari­able names to exist­ing Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables using the new Pro­cess­ing Rules fea­ture (cov­ered adeptly by Jason Egan here and by Kevin Rogers here; we’re also going to cover it in depth in a future post in this series). Note that all exist­ing Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables (s.pageName, s.eVar67, s.prop4) are still avail­able for your use, if you pre­fer. We’ve found that many devel­op­ers pre­fer non-arcane vari­able names, so we’ve made that an option for them (and for you) when you’re using Site­Cat­a­lyst 15.

  • Sup­port for assign­ing a value other than 1 to a counter event in s.events. This is an extremely use­ful fea­ture which is avail­able in both Site­Cat­a­lyst 14 and Site­Cat­a­lyst 15. Tra­di­tion­ally, when you want to count a con­ver­sion met­ric (i.e. cus­tom event) with a value other than one, you need to do so using the s.products vari­able. This is fine if your met­ric is actu­ally tied to prod­ucts, such as ship­ping, tax, dis­counts, etc. How­ever, it’s often con­fus­ing or incon­ve­nient when your met­ric has noth­ing to do with prod­ucts. To do this, you need to set your events as “numeric” or “cur­rency” events in the Admin Con­sole. H.23.2 code intro­duces the abil­ity to set “counter” events to val­ues other than one directly in the s.events vari­able. You don’t need to use the s.products vari­able to do this in most cases, and you don’t need to change the event type from “counter.” For exam­ple, this:

    s.events="event5"
    s.products=";;;;event5=16"

    becomes this:

    s.events="event5=16"

    Much nicer! Of course, you can/should con­tinue to set events in the s.products string when you want those events to be tied to indi­vid­ual prod­ucts, as in the exam­ple given above. A few things to note about this feature:

    • This fea­ture sup­ports inte­gers only. If you need to use dec­i­mals, you should con­tinue to use numeric or cur­rency events in the s.products variable.
    • If you do pass dec­i­mals, they will be trun­cated, not rounded.
  • Sup­port for new method of track­ing video using con­ver­sion eVars and events. As you may be aware, we are cur­rently in beta with a brand new video mea­sure­ment and ana­lyt­ics solu­tion that is avail­able to both Site­Cat­a­lyst 14 and Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 users. If you are inter­ested in par­tic­i­pat­ing in the beta, go to our beta page and let us know! This code ver­sion sup­ports this solution.
  • Removed sup­port for set­ting Media.trackWhilePlaying to false. This option is no longer avail­able; it was rarely used and, when used, made com­plete video mea­sure­ment dif­fi­cult. If you do use s.Media.trackWhilePlaying=“false” in your video imple­men­ta­tion, you may want to con­sider updat­ing your video imple­men­ta­tion or not upgrad­ing to H.23.2 code if that set­ting is crit­i­cal to you.

So in sum­mary, why would you upgrade?

  • You are on Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 and want to take advan­tage of new fea­tures such as Con­text Data and Pro­cess­ing Rules.
  • You want to pass cus­tom events that have a value other than one, and that aren’t nec­es­sar­ily related to prod­ucts on your site.
  • You want to be involved in the new video mea­sure­ment beta.

More detail on some of these fea­tures is forthcoming—both on this blog and elsewhere—so stay tuned. As always, please feel free to sub­mit JavaScript code sug­ges­tions at the Idea Exchange; we’re lis­ten­ing! And if you have any ques­tions about this code release or any­thing else related to the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite, leave me a com­ment or send me a tweet (@benjamingaines).