IBM Digital Data Exchange integration

To simplify the process of collecting and sending customer shopping behavior data to analytics providers, integrate WebSphere Commerce with IBM Digital Data Exchange (DDX)

With this integration, customer behavior data can be collected with existing WebSphere Commerce analytics tags and sent to DDX. DDX can then relay the data to IBM Digital Analytics, and other IBM and third-party analytics providers.

By using DDX, you can collect data about customer behavior in your store through a simplified analytics tagging format. The format of the JavaScript object that is sent to DDX with your customer behavior data follows the W3C specifications for JavaScript objects.

For more information about the W3C specifications for JavaScript objects, see the Customer Experience Digital Data Layer documentation that is provided by the W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Community Group.
For more information about DDX, see IBM Digital Data Exchange.

To enable the integration for stores that are based on the WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 8 Aurora starter store, complete the following tasks:

Enable the useDDX setting in your analytics provider configuration file.
Configure DDX to deploy IBM Digital Analytics tags to your generated store html pages.

If your store pages already include WebSphere Commerce analytics tags, you do not need to add any new tags to integrate with DDX. The data that is sent to DDX, however, does require a page type identifier value to identify the data as being from a specific page type. By default, stores that are based on the WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 8 Aurora starter store include page type parameter values on store pages. The page type values are included as a parameter within the existing page view tag that is included on all store pages. If your store is not based on this starter store, or you want to add other page type values, you need to add the page type values to the page view tag on your store pages.

By enabling the integration, WebSphere Commerce no longer calls store page cmCreate functions to pass parameter values for analytics tags directly to IBM Digital Analytics. Instead, the DDX integration configuration declares a JavaScript object, digitalData, which stores that parameter value data. When your store is integrated with IBM Digital Analytics, the tag function calls that are deployed using DDX automatically detect and transmit the data that is defined in the digitalData JavaScript object to IBM Digital Analytics and other analytics providers.

Note: The integration to relay data through DDX to IBM Digital Analytics does not support asynchronous additions to the JavaScript object. For example, shopping cart Ajax calls continue to use cmCreate functions to pass parameter values.