Is It Possible to Track Swipes on a Mobile Web Site

[nyambol]

Hello,

I can't find any reference to this question, so I am asking here.

Our web site contains some product carousels that scroll right/left. On the web, you can scroll it by clicking on the popup arrows that appear when you mouse over the edge of the carousel. In the rendering of the site on a mobile device, those arrows are visible, but it also is possible to scroll the carousel by swiping. Is there a way for me to track those swipes? I feel certain that most users will swipe first and only fall back to tapping the arrows if swiping does not work. My suspicion is that the answer to my question is "No," but I want to be sure.

Thanks.

mp

[RobertBlakeley]

We treat swipes in our apps like click tracking. A swipe is a click. This could be up down or sideways. We differentiate swipes from clicks using a naming convention for the swipe-click name. e.g. cararsl_swplft (the swipe), cararsl_lft (for an actual click).

However, we do not use Activity Map for tracking clicks, but rather pass the swipe/click calls into custom variables (a pre-activity map implementation). If we were redoing the implementation today, I suspect we would use the Activity Map customizations.

[abhinavbalooni]

Hey @nyambol 

If you are looking to differentiate between who clicked and who swiped, that might not be possible but if you want to treat swipe as a click then the following should help ( I am assuming the carousel doesn't auto scroll).

If you have developer support, they can trigger a direct call rule using _satellite.track('<your string here') or dispatch a custom event which you can listen to in an Adobe Launch/Data Collection rule and then trigger an analytics call.

Developers can code basis of enters viewport functionality to address this.

Hope the above helps.

Cheers,

Abhinav

[Jennifer_Dungan]

We have code that helps differentiate swipes from clicks, but this is part of our larger "Activity Map" replication...

I have some dimensions set aside that on web, I use Processing Rules to set the Link, Region and Page value of our Activity Map data to these eVars... in our Mobile App, I have our developers set context variables that replicate the behaviour/data, so that both web and app will have comparable information all in one place. For clicks, the regions are set similar to Activity Map, i.e I have our app "split" into named regions. On swipe, the link name and region are changed to indicate a forward or backward, etc swipe.

A similar approach could be used on Mobile Web with the right integrations. A swipe wouldn't really trigger Activity Map, so in theory, the Processing Rule could look if the eVar is already set with a value, or overwrite Activity Map if a value exists... 

But I am not sure if the "swipes" you are talking about are actual navigation... which may mean that Activity Map or replication of such may not be the best option... if this is just a carousel, you could work with your developers to trigger a custom JS event that you can listen for when a swipe occurs...

However, make sure you have a clear definition of what constitutes a swipe... Does the carousel move one block at a time (i.e. clearly one link item at a time)? Does it move based on a few pixels at time (smooth scroll)? How far should the scroll move to trigger a tracking event? Should it trigger as a scroll starts? Trigger when the movement ends? Is there a limit to ensure you aren't using up server calls? If the user swipes back and forth multiple times, is each motion to be captured over and over again, or should it be limited to one call per item impression?

Once you have a clear definition, you should be able to work with your developers to create an event, then you can listen for that event and track the information that you need... you can even have your developers provide information in the event such as direction, or how far scrolled, etc....