Measurement Best Practices -- Module 9

For the sake of this post, we’ll again narrow down the spectrum to one of GMI’s brand sites – naturevalley.com – and analyze from that perspective.

AV outlines nine steps in his blog post (located at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-technical-implementation-best-practices-javascript-tags/). Some of which I can tell GMI follows (from the web source code), and others which aren’t so easy to evaluate without deeper access.

   

   1.)  Tag all your pages

a.     GMI does seem to have all of the pages on naturevalley.com JS tagged. I’m not technically sure if I’m allowed to copy and paste the source into the blog, so just to be safe, I’ll let you view the code for yourselves – which can be done easily in any web browser.

   

   2.)  Tags go last

a.     All of the tags appear to be placed before the closing header tag, so I’m going to assume these are async JS tags, otherwise I imagine they would be before the closing body tag.

   

   3.)   Tags are inline

a.     I didn't see any odd placement of tags on naturevalley.com – all of the tags were inline.

   

   4.)  Unique page definition

a.     This isn’t so easy to discern, as the site is uses Flash for the product page. Each product appears to have its own unique subpage embedded within the larger encompassing product page.

   

   5.)  First party cookies

a.     I honestly can’t say whether or not we use third or first party cookies, since we don't sell product through the site, and we don't have a sort of “account login” like we do on BettyCrocker.com – I’ll ask someone and find out, though! J

   

   6.)  JS Wrapped Links

a.     I didn't see anything like this in the code I looked at.

   

   7.)  Redirects

a.     There are several of these throughout the site, especially the homepage – where redirects to other brand and corporate sites are placed.

   

   8.)  Validate

a.     I’m sure that there are several people our web team whose sole task is to ensure that the data we need is being captured correctly, however, that is beyond my purview.

   

   9.)  Rich Media (i.e. Flash, RSS, etc.)

a.     naturevalley.com uses a ton of rich media across the site, so I imagine our tracking of the site increases in complexity – as AV suggests.

From the looks of what I can see, I would say that GMI is doing everything they need to ensure that their sites are being measured in a meaningful way. The JS tags are placed properly and used carefully, and the site is clean, quick to load, and easy to navigate.