Navigation Tracking Recommendations

[brendanl5525537]

Hey All,

I'm looking for any recommendations on the best way(s) of tracking and analyzing website navigation. Primarily for engagement/clicks, but the business team is also interested in how click instances convert.

Currently, we are tracking all Left Navigation clicks with an eVar. So looking at metrics such as: instances, orders, revenue, conversion (orders/instances), and revenue per action (revenue/instance).

Some open questions are:

1. We'd like to similarly incorporate Header and Footer clicks, as some left navigation links have recently moved to the Header. Should we track these in the same "Left Nav" eVar and also collect a location (left nav, header, footer) in a prop? Should we create two new eVars for each (header, footer)? Or should we do something entirely different?

2. As we have a responsive design site, we've come across some issues with tracking the mobile inflection. Should we track this the same way as Question 1, or differently? Our Mobile Inflection is also a little tricky, as it does not have a footer and our left navigation is slightly altered (contains links from the desktop inflection's header).

I look forward to your responses and appreciate the help.

Thanks

[devinderbanga · Accepted solution]

Hi 

As far i understand that you wants to track links with their location.

1. If you dont want to waste another variable than you can populate link name with location in custom link tracking method . e.g linkname ="Footer:XYZ link" .

2. Use an eVar for the location and and another eVar which hold the same value as link name.

Please let me know if you need any additional information.

Regards

Devinder

[warrensander]

I agree that if you are going to do link tracking and have a common c-frame with common navigation for all pages that you make sure to tag the header, left nav and footer with some prefix. This way if you have a 'Buy Now' link in the body of the page and also have "Buy Now" in the left nav and in the header if you don't prefix you can't tell which one was clicked. And trying to figure out the (x,y) location of the click doesn't help if you have responsive design because it will move all over the place based on the customers browser configuration. Adding a prefix like hdr-Buy Now or lft-Buy Now or ftr-Buy Now will help you figure out which 'Buy Now' go clicked. I also like to use an abbreviation just on the off chance that the prefix words might actually appear in a content created link. They probably won't use hdr- or ftr- or lft- and its easier to remove that from their allowed dictionary.

Ask your Adobe consultant (or client care) for the Link Tracking plugin. It has some issues but you should be able to use it to grab the link that got clicked (just be forwarned that sometimes the link is an image or has extra html code surrounding the anchor tag value) and you can take that link click name from the plugin and your page name and shove that into an evar. We even setup an onclick function that sets the link click value so we don't have issues with images etc. Also we setup our navigation links with prefixes Not using our onclick but via an ajax set of code but we do have a lot of left nav which is not universal using this function. 

Also the link click is recorded on the next page the customer goes to so you have to have both the link click name and the previous page name available on the next page when the s_code runs.