SiteCatalyst 15.3 and JavaScript H.24.4 Released

I am excited about today’s release of Site­Cat­a­lyst 15.3, which includes improve­ments for Site­Cat­a­lyst 14.9. High­lights from the release include:

• A sig­nif­i­cantly improved algo­rithm for man­ag­ing highly unique variables
• Stan­dard and cus­tom bot fil­ter­ing avail­able in the Admin Console
• Pathfinder, Pages Not Found, Full Paths and other reports are avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15
• And many other improvements

But you can read about those improve­ments in Ben’s blog post, Release Notes or watch the videos that cover them. Let’s talk about what has changed in App­Mea­sure­ment for JavaScript since the last blog post about H.23.2.

Fil­ter­ing Chrome Pre-Render

Chrome allows web sites to spec­ify links that should be pre-rendered, thus elim­i­nat­ing page load time when those pages are clicked on. For a time, this was used on Google​.com for the top search result, and may still be, though we’ve not been able to observe it lately.

Pre-rendering a page can cause real trou­ble for ana­lysts, because a pre-rendered page looks like a reg­u­lar page view in web ana­lyt­ics tools. If the page is pre-rendered, but no one vis­its the pageThis could result in a higher-than nor­mal bounce rate, inflated

H.24.4 prop­erly han­dles Google Chrome’s pre-render fea­ture, so that data is not sent to Site­Cat­a­lyst until the vis­i­tor actu­ally views the pre-rendered page.

Video Updates

• Bug fixes. Since the release of the new video mea­sure­ment mod­ule in H.23.2, we have had three bugs fixed in that module.
  • First, in H.23.3 we fixed an error that caused one of the video track­ing vari­ables from being sent.
  • Then, in H.23.6 we improved the accu­racy of the per­cent mea­sure­ments used to fire mile­stone events.
  • Finally, in H.24.1, we reduced the num­ber of server calls required (slightly) by allow­ing seg­ments and mile­stones that occur simul­ta­ne­ously to be sent in a sin­gle server call.

If you’re using the video mod­ule released in H.23.2 and haven’t upgraded, this would be a good time to do so.

• New method. A new video com­plete method allows you to trig­ger a com­plete event. This is par­tic­u­larly use­ful for live stream­ing events, where there isn’t a des­ig­nated video end.

Con­text Data Variables

If you’ve upgraded to Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 or will be upgrad­ing soon, I strongly rec­om­mend you look into Pro­cess­ing Rules and using Con­text Data Vari­ables. Pro­cess­ing rules can greatly enhance your abil­ity to update your imple­men­ta­tion with­out involv­ing a JavaScript file update, and Con­text Data Vari­ables allow your web devel­oper to send data to Site­Cat­a­lyst with­out know­ing the eVar, event or prop it needs to be stored in.

With that back­ground, H.24.2 included a fix that allows con­text data vari­ables to be passed with link clicks. Here’s how it would work:

<a href="success_page.html" onClick="sendData(this)">

...

function sendData(link){

   s.contextData['success']="link clicked";

   s.linkTrackVars="contextData.success";

   s.tl(link,'o',"Success Link");

}

Auto­matic Exit Link Tracking

In most sit­u­a­tions, you don’t want all vari­ables to be sent with an exit link. How­ever, there was a bug that caused props, eVars and events set on the page to be sent with exit links, despite the fact that link­Track­Vars and link­Track­Events were both set to “none”. This was fixed with H.23.8.

Search Refer­rer Improvements

Back with H.23.4 we changed how Yahoo and Google refer­rers were trun­cated. Rather than trun­cat­ing some of the crit­i­cal query strings, we rearranged the query string to ensure that the key­word and other key­words are kept.

Sum­mary

In short, you should con­sider upgrad­ing your JS file in the next few months, given the improve­ments with Chrome’s pre-rendering. If you’re track­ing video on still using H.23.2, you should upgrade very soon. If you’re using H.23.3 or lower, you should upgrade as soon as pos­si­ble to avoid any lost data with long Google and Yahoo refer­rer URLs.

Final Tip

If you haven’t looked into Adobe Tag­Man­ager, I rec­om­mend you call your account man­ager or account exec­u­tive for a walk-through. Updat­ing your JS file is much eas­ier with that tool, as is deploy­ing any vendor’s tags on your site. Using Tag­Man­ager you can push an updated JS file to devel­op­ment, stag­ing, and then pro­duc­tion at any time.