I recently spoke with a friend of mine about my experience using Omniture’s ClickMap product and I thought it may be beneficial to others if I recorded my findings here.
I feared the day that the executives at my company caught wind of the ClickMap tool, it was my experience when I worked at Omniture that executives would gloss over all the sweet features of SiteCatalyst and the sheer power of Discover to droll over the sexy display of ClickMap, yet the data was always questionable.
I decided rather than to shy away, I would dive into ClickMap and test, test, test, until I fully understood how it worked.
Allowing the ClickMap tool to automatically track our links was out of the question, the data was far too inaccurate to be of any value. Omniture recommended I deploy something they called “ObjectID tracking” to solve my tracking issues.
From my testing, the s_ObjectID works perfectly on all link types (simple links, links with query string parameters, exit links) if I manually assign the ID, so that gave me a sense of hope. However, without an automated delivery method, it will be unusable.
My next attempt was to use a plug-in supplied by Omniture that automatically assigns the s_ObjectID to links.
The plug-in is generating the ID based on a combination of the destination link and a sequence number that is applied to the end of the ID. I spent some time trying to get the plugin to work and it seems, after breaking it down, that it works as expected on all link types except links that contain a ‘?’ in them. Any links with a ‘?’ were failed to be overlaid by ClickMap until I added one simple line of code to the plug-in:
ID=ID.replace(“?”,”_”);
What do you know? It fixed all my problems!
Avinash Kaushik
Crepuscular Light
Kevin Rogers
Pritesh Patel
Rudi Shumpert
One Comment
Thanks Thompson, this has been a sore spot for us as well. We are going to implement the object tracking soon, hopefully it is far more accurate than ClickMap stand alone.
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[...] I see ClickMap and CrazyEgg as being complimentary tools. ClickMap is great for measuring ongoing site behavior, it can easily be tied to site conversion, and is great for measuring sites with dynamic content. CrazyEgg is best suited for structured tests, the run for a pre-determined period of time and for measuring exact click locations to better understand creative placement. NOTE: This test covers the out-of-the-box deployment of ClickMap. I did not test the impact of dynamic pages. For sites that use highly dynamic pages, Omniture recommends using s_ObjectID tracking. Speak with your Omniture representive about updating your code to automatically assign unique IDs for link tracking. Also refer to my post Omniture ClickMap & s_ObjectID [...]