Has anyone blogged or any insights to share about direct call rules and especially about the amount of rules to manage - less is better or not? I'm pretty sure answer eventually depends size and complexity of site and what else you might want to populate (custom code etc) based on rules. Let's take example. All the basic page tracking is done through extension, but you might have few shopping funnels and lots of different actions to track.
_satellite.track('start_shopping_funnel', {variable1: 'value1', variable2:'value2'} );
_satellite.track('shopping_funnel_phase2', {variable1: 'value1', variable2:'value2'} );
_satellite.track('shopping_funnel_order_completed', {variable1: 'value1', variable2:'value2'} );
OR would just use one direct call rule like this:
_satellite.track('view', {view: '<phase>', variable2:'value2'} ); // and <phase> is either "start", "phase2" or "order_completed".
My initial experience with coders is that they prefer first option to have multiple rules that are easier to understand and even Launch settings would be easier to do when you could populate (without custom code) eventX with first rule and the other rule could populate eventY. Or if you need to send data to other tools based on these rules the amount of custom code would be less on different rules etc.
However, it would be so tempting to use only one rule and that way the specs would be so much easier to do and if there are additional steps in the shopping funnel then coder could just add another "view" value without the need to do new rule in Launch. And if you need to add new variable through Tag Manager or hard-code it to the site then again less work with only one rule.
If I would use only one rule for all additional "views" then there could be another rule for "action" that could contain all kinds clicks etc. Again, you could ask would it be better to do multiple rules for different actions or just one rule like this:
_satellite.track('action', {action: '<action_name>', variable2:'value2'} );
Any comments or blogs to share about this?
