Level 2

Question

Regarding the Activity Map, it is possible to retrieve the href value of the link

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
November 22, 2023
1 reply
1846 views

Hello, we are using Activity Map, and when clicking on a CTA, we want it to capture the href value of the link rather than the button's name. We have employed a dataElement with the Activity Map customizer extension, but it retrieves the entire URL, and we need to exclude parameters from the button's URL. Is it possible to achieve this? Thank you.

Analytics

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Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

It should be possible.. but full disclosure, I've never used this extension...

I have done all my Activity Map customizations via code in the Analytics extension custom code area....

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/analyze/activity-map/link-tracking/activitymap-link-tracking-methodology.html?lang=en

So basically, I modified our tracking to take the link name from links, the button text from buttons, and the alt text from images wrapped in anchor tags (where there was no "link text").

Starting with the basic code:

s.ActivityMap.link = function(clickedElement) {
  var linkId;
  if (clickedElement && clickedElement.tagName.toUpperCase() === 'A') {
    // This will take the "title attribute"
    linkId = clickedElement.getAttribute('title');
  }
  return linkId;
}

Obviously, this isn't what you want, but you should be able to take the href attribute instead of the title...

You can then add some JS to remove parameters if they exist, something like:

s.ActivityMap.link = function(clickedElement) {
  var linkId;
  if (clickedElement && clickedElement.tagName.toUpperCase() === 'A') {
    // This will take the "href attribute"
    linkId = clickedElement.getAttribute('href');
    if (linkId && linkId.indexOf('?') > -1){
      linkId = linkId.substr(0, linkId.indexOf('?'));
    }
  }
  return linkId;
}

This can just be added to the top of the custom code in your extension, it does not need to be called in s_doPlugins.

When the Analytics script is loaded, this code will run and manipulate how Activity Map reads the clicked elements.

You will want to test this obviously, and maybe make additional tweaks to the code.

E

ExO_SpainAuthor

Level 2

Hi Jennifer,

Thank you very much for your reply.
Unfortunately, the solution cannot be applied as it overwrites the original function found in Adobe Analytics, i.e. it modifies the functionality of the extension. We are trying to create a code where a new dataElement is created that calls the functionality of the Adobe Analytics extension and removes the parameters from the URL.
Any help is welcome.
Thanks

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Hi again, Jennifer -
It might be best to bring the link URL into the Activity Map, but for expediency, I tried your suggestion of using a processing rule. I enabled a blank eVar and set it to a.ClickMap.link(Context Data), but nothing's coming through into the s object or Workspace.

In the beacon, the ClickMap values are not inside the contextData. ClickMap Object ID seems to be the same as oid; according this doc, oid = s_objectID is "Object identifier for the last page. Used in Activity Map", but here, it's the current page URL, arrived at from the link on the Activity Map Page (Home); maybe it's saved for the next hit, rolls over as you go...? Regardless, it'd work, but I'm not sure how to set my new eVar to this value, it's not in the Context Data list (although the ClickMap values are).

So I guess I'll have to (ask a dev to) go into Launch (Data Collection, sorry 🙂 and make a new rule with custom JS to parse the a@href, but it seems silly since it's already being collected.

While we're at it, could we avoid the whole Acronym plugin thing and sneak it into the Activity Map like so maybe?
s.contextData['a.activitymap.linkURL'] = {oid parsed from the beacon or custom JS for a@href};
Although here they say don't begin contextData calls with a, it's reserved (for AM I guess).

So maybe the simplest in Launch would be to assign the new Link URL eVar like so?

s.eVar98 = s_objectID

The docs say s_objectID is the click URL by default, but you can change the values if you want to distinguish links further, but link URL would be great!

Sorry to beat this to death, but coming from a GA world, it's kinda flabbergasting to me that Link URL isn't captured out of the box and was also neglected when we were setting up AA.

Hi @davidlu17,

Yep, I just confirmed the same... even though the Click URL is captured, the data doesn't appear to make it to the Processing Rules to be usable in a rule.

On a page with an oid value, I tried pulling up s_objectID in the console.. I wasn't able to get it to work, it just came back empty (I imagine it might not be retrievable in this context).. but by all means, see if you can... What about trying to use "D=oid"; using dynamic variables the same way I use D=mid to capture the ECID / MID value into a dimension.. Using "D=" followed by the payload param is supposed to copy that value into your dimension....

I use D=mid to get the value of mid, and D=g to get a duplication of the current URL into a custom dimension...

In theory s.eVar98="D=oid" might work? You can try coding this right into the Set Variables area:

To be fair though, Activity Map is more designed for page to page navigation (not so much for click tracking on buttons)...

If your flow is literally Page A > Page B (with no actual tracking on the click)... you already have the URL via the tracking that happens on Page B, assuming you have a dimension set up to track the URL on every page.

Page A
- pageName = domain: page a
- eVar1 = https://www.domain.com/pagea/
(click on link "something", in region "header")
Page B
- pageName = domain: page b
- eVar1 = https://www.domain.com/pageb/
- Activity Map Link = something
- Activity Map Region = header
- Activity Map Page = domain: page a

Activity Map captures the information about the link that was clicked, on what page, in what region of the page...

If in your reporting you want to see where it went, you can simply correlate your activity map data with your eVar1.

However, if you have "click" tracking on the link, that is where things get tricky, since the "current URL" isn't the destination, but the current page where the tracking is triggered.

In my implementation, I only have a few special "click tracking" elements, and since I know where those elements go, I've never really needed to capture the destination...

I hear what you are saying, personally, I actually dislike GA's use the URL as the primary identifier... this means I have to either do extra work to capture the parameters as separate dimension (which due to GA's limitation of 2 levels of breakdowns means I can't really do a lot of deep dives), or I have to leave the params in, but now every variation creates a new row... so I can't see at a glance all the tracking to a page... But I get it, coming from the GA side of things, this is a shift in thinking...

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