Just-In-Time Tagging
JITT is a web analytics implementation technique I'm currently developing.
After working on the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, which goal is to ease the quality assurance of the tagging, the next logical step is to ease the tagging itself.
The technique is based on years of experience implementing various web analytics tools and attempts to alleviate the most common issues:
- The skillset required for implementing the solution is too tightly coupled with an intimate knowledge of the backend technology
- Communication between Marketing and IT is often challenging
- The implementation process is long, complex and likelihood of errors are high
- Tagging is often handled by first-timer or inexperienced developers
- Tagging quality degrades as the site continue to evolve
Context
JITT was initially developed for Omniture SiteCatalyst
with the help of clients.
JITT benefits
The JITT benefits are:
-
Last-mile implementation
- Rather than generating web analytics tags from the server-side, the tags are totally handled on the client side. This offloads a very small amount of work to the client and isn't noticeable to the user.
-
Standard compliant & Semantic Web
- The implementation inforces separation of FORM (HTML), style (CSS) and function (JS) and leverages semantic web concepts.
-
Implementation efficiency
- The development cycle and complexity is significantly reduced by allowing immediate unit testing. Although the number of itterations remains the same, development time, unit testing and acceptance testing are generally reduced by as much as 50%. The skillset required for the implementation is HTML and JavaScript, no knowledge of the back-end technology is required.
-
Lightweight
- JITT uses a robust lightweight and cross-browser compatible library. The JITT code itself is small and cached on the client-side.
-
Maintenance
- As the site evolve, the only requirement is to keep the minimal tags on all pages. The web analytics implementation specialist can easily maintain the JITT tag file.
