Page view tag

The WebSphere Commerce page view tag collects information about store pages that a customer viewed.

This tag collects the following data to pass to an external analytics system:

• Page name

• Page category

• Search keyword, when the page viewed is a search results page

• Search results count, when the page viewed is a search results page

• Store identifier

This tag can also pass extra parameters for tag customization.

Parameters

The following list identifies the required and optional parameters for the page view tag.

Note for IBM Digital Analytics: The following parameters are for the WebSphere Commerce <cm:pageview /> tag. This tag generates the IBM Digital Analytics cmCreatePageViewTag data tag.

pageType

An optional parameter that identifies the page type. Use this parameter when the WebSphere Commerce store is integrated with IBM Digital Data Exchange (DDX). The value for this parameter is used as a unique page type identifier to identify the data that is retrieved for a page and sent to DDX. DDX uses this parameter value to determine how to relay the data, for instance, to IBM Digital Analytics for analysis.

The default value for this parameter is "wcs-standardpages", which identifies a page as a standard WebSphere Commerce store page. To include other parameter values on store pages, configure DDX to create the page group and rule for the value and define how DDX is to relay the data that is associated with the value. For more information about setting values for this parameter, see
Configure the IBM Digital Data Exchange integration.

pagename

An optional parameter that communicates a specific page name to the external analytics system. If you do not include this parameter, the page view tag uses the page title.

category

An optional parameter that communicates the category ID of the page.

On search results pages, we must include more parameters to communicate search-related data to an external analytics system:

• If the site uses the CatEntrySearchListDataBean, use the following parameter:

  databean

  The object that is passed must be a populated instance of the CatEntrySearchListDataBean. The page view tag uses this data bean to find the search keyword and the number of results that are returned to pass to the external analytics system. If you use this parameter, do not use the srchKeyword or srchResults parameters.

• If the store does not use the CatEntrySearchListDataBean, or you do not get an instance of the CatEntrySearchListDataBean in our search results page, use both of the following parameters:

  srchKeyword

  This parameter communicates the search keyword used when the page viewed is a search results page. If you use this parameter, do not use the databean parameter.

  srchResults

  This parameter communicates the number of search results when the page viewed is a search results page. If you use this parameter, do not use the databean parameter.

To send more information to the external analytics system, use the following parameter:

extraparms

An optional parameter that communicates more information to the external analytics system. This parameter is provided for cases in which we might need to generate some custom report that requires more information. There are multiple ways to pass values using the extraparms parameter:

Description	Example
Specify explicit values as properly escaped JavaScript. To pass more than one value, separate values with a comma.	extraparms="\"value1\",\"value2\""
Specify dynamic content by calling a method. Any extraparms value that starts and ends with the $ symbol, for example, $getMethod$, is assumed to be a method name of the CatEntrySearchListDataBean. The only restriction on the method name is that it must take no arguments and the object that returned must implement the toString() method.	extraparms="$getMethod$"

Note for IBM Digital Analytics: Use the extraparms parameter to pass either IBM Digital Analytics Explore attributes, or data for custom IBM Digital Analytics reports, or both. See Passing extra data to IBM Digital Analytics with the extraparms parameter.

returnAsJSON

An optional parameter that is designed for use when we are tracking customer interactions that do not cause a full page refresh. For example, in a web 2.0 store, the customer might interact with the mini shopping cart, the Product Fast Finder, or a wish list. To track these page interactions, we can use this parameter to return a JSON object instead of generating the analytics data tag. When the web 2.0 store tagging framework detects that this analytics event occurs, the tagging framework can use the JSON object to populate the analytics data tag. We can set the following values for this parameter:

true

Return a JSON object.

false

Generate the analytics data tag.

The following code is the JSON data structure for the page view tag:

[{pagename:"PAGENAME",category:"PAGECATEGORY",
searchTerms:"SEARCHTERM",searchCount:"SEARCHCOUNT",
storeId:"STOREID"}]

Tag versions

WebSphere Commerce provides two versions of the page view tag:

1. An abstract base tag implementation class: CommonBaseTag. Analytics vendors who want to provide a page view tag in their web analytics JSP tag library for WebSphere Commerce can extend this base tag class. Vendors can extend the tag class to get the page view data and implement their own logic to generate the vendor-specific page view tagging APIs.

2. A default implementation of the page view tag (<cm:pageview />) for IBM Digital Analytics. This implementation automatically generates the IBM Digital Analytics cmCreatePageViewTag data tag.

Related concepts
IBM Digital Analytics, formerly known as Coremetrics Analytics integration with Web 2.0 starter stores
Passing extra data to IBM Digital Analytics with the extraparms parameter

Related reference
Use the page view tag with IBM Digital Analytics