Coders, your time has come! In this episode, we’re going to trigger client-side events from Javascript using XdbTracker – a Client-side Event Tracker for Sitecore 9.x
We’re going to fill even more built-in Experience Analytics reports with data… the dashboards are starting to look quite impressive.
XdbTracker is available on Github:
https://github.com/lowedown/XdbTracker
XConnectHelper can also be downlaoded on Github:
https://github.com/lowedown/xConnectHelper
In this episode of Diving into Sitecore Analytics, we’re going to use campaigns to feed our acquisition reports with useful data. (and do some neat personalization)
By the way, this post from 2014 is still valid! It describes how campaigns are triggered and how to customize triggering.
I have launched a video series on youtube. The goal is to touch on as many Sitecore Analytics and Experience Platform features as possible without going into too much detail. We’ll start out with out of the box features…but coders don’t worry: there will be code in the later episodes! 🙂
Any kind of feedback is always welcome.
In the first episode, we’ll learn how to measure user engagement through goals and page events:
Setting up and testing xConnect can be a challenge – especially in on premise setups. Are all the certificates set up? Are all databases up and connection strings correct?
Initiially, tracking, processing and reporting can be somewhat of a black box because to see it working correctly i.E. to test experience profile functionality, you’ll have to first write code to identify a contact through a form submit, start a session with interactions, trigger identification and wait for your session to expire and wait for processing / reporting in order for your contact to show up in the expirence profile manager.
To aid with this, I have ported my trusted little xDB Helper over to Sitecore 9+ / xConnect. Because of the many API and conceptual changes, this was a re-write from scratch. The source code is available on Github.
After installing, you can access the page through
/sitecore%20modules/Web/xConnectHelper/xConnectHelper.aspx?key=<yourkey>
On this page you can…
Some possible use cases:
I want to check the xConnect connection:
If there is a connection problem, this will be immediately shown on the xConnectHelper page. Also, if the tracker is not active becaues of config or license issues.
I want to check if data is written to the collection and reporting db:
Interact with your website and then hit flush current session. Processing of your contact and interactions will immediately start and data should be visible in the databases within seconds.
I want to test contact search / experience profile:
The experience profile manager only lists identified contacts. You can set an identifier for your contact, then flush session. Your contact should show in the list within a few seconds.
Important Note: Because this tool is made to debug current contacts and interactions in-session, it can not be used as a regular Sitecore admin page and is therefore publicly accessible (ony restricted by your access key). You are responsible for setting appropriate measures to regulate access to this page.
Sorry for the xmas pun but hey, it’s December.
Back to topic. Debugging xDB issues on a remote environment can be very difficult. Is the MongoDB connection OK? Is tracking configured correctly? Are contacts being created and identified? Is my data pushed to the correct places, when my session ends? Why is GeoIP detection not working?
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