IBM Digital Analytics integration with Web 2.0 starter stores
The WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 starter stores use Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Dojo widgets. With these technologies certain customer interactions with store page content do not result in a full page refresh. IBM Digital Analytics, formerly known as Coremetrics Analytics provides a framework to track these intrapage interactions, in addition to interactions that result in a full-page refresh. This framework ensures that IBM Digital Analytics collects accurate analytics data about how customers are using your Web 2.0 store.
Web 2.0 starter stores that are integrated with IBM Digital Analytics
The following WebSphere Commerce starter stores contain code in their JSP pages to track both full-page and intrapage interactions:- Aurora starter store
- Madisons starter store
- Elite starter store
How analytics data is captured in Web 2.0 stores
Web 2.0 starter stores capture analytics data differently depending on the type of customer interaction that is being tracked:Interaction | Description |
---|---|
Full-page interactions | To track interactions that cause a full-page
refresh, the store pages contain WebSphere Commerce analytics tags.
These tags are placed at the bottom of each JSP page. When the full
page refreshes, the WebSphere Commerce analytics tag generates a corresponding IBM Digital Analytics data
tag that contains the analytics data to provide to the IBM Digital Analytics server.
For example:
|
Intrapage interactions For IBM Digital Analytics integration, these interactions are called IBM Digital Analytics events. |
To track the interactions that do not cause
a full-page refresh, the store JSP pages contain business logic to
communicate data about these events to IBM Digital Analytics.
When the interaction occurs, the controller or widget for the intrapage
content generates an event. The IBM Digital Analytics event
listener detects the event and gathers relevant analytics data about
the event. Then, the IBM Digital Analytics event
listener calls the corresponding IBM Digital Analytics JavaScript
function to provide the analytics data to the IBM Digital Analytics server.
For example:
|
How intrapage interactions are tracked in a Web 2.0 store
The following diagram shows the process for tracking intrapage interactions and how the analytics data is communicated to IBM Digital Analytics:The tracking process unfolds like the following process:
- 1 A customer interacts with page content that does not cause a full page refresh. For example, the customer interacts with the mini shopping cart, the Product Fast Finder, or a wish list. Each of these intrapage interactions is a tracked analytics event, and the store page contains the business logic that is required to report on the event.
- 2 The store page makes an Ajax get
request. The request calls the WebSphere Commerce server to get a
view that corresponds to the type of interaction, for example, the
AnalyticsProductView
orAnalyticsCartView
. These views are defined in the struts configuration file for the site, and each view points to a corresponding view JSP file. - 3 The view JSP file retrieves the
related analytics data from the WebSphere Commerce database and creates
a JSON object that contains the data.
The view JSP files can use the WebSphere Commerce analytics tags with the attribute
returnAsJSON
set totrue
to return the analytics data in JSON format to the IBM Digital Analytics event listeners. For example, theAnalyticsProductView.jsp
file contains the product tag as shown in the following example:<cm:product catentryId="${WCParam.productId}" returnAsJSON="true" />
. - 4 The view JSP file returns the JSON object to the store page.
- 5 The IBM Digital Analytics event
listener detects the event and gathers the analytics data from the
JSON object. The IBM Digital Analytics event
listener then calls the corresponding IBM Digital Analytics tag
function, for example, the
cmCreateProductViewTag
orcmCreateCartViewTag
function. The tag functions send the analytics data to the IBM Digital Analytics server.
The subtopics in this section focus on understanding and customizing the framework that tracks intrapage interactions. For more information about the WebSphere Commerce analytics tags, see Analytics tag library for IBM WebSphere Commerce.