Analyzing user behavior by Active Site Analytics

You can collect data about user behavior in the portal and send that data to a service for analysis. For this purpose the portal provides Active Site Analytics (ASA).

The portal provides a rich set of page metadata as part of its themes and skins. Examples are:

• Page title

• Page identifier

• Portlet title

• Portlet identifier.

You can write scripts to retrieve the data. Such scripts are called aggregators. The portal Tab Menu - Page Builder theme includes two sample aggregators asa_sample.js and asa_dojo_sample.js.

You can customize these or write your own aggregators to collect page metadata such as the ones listed above and more. For the samples, refer to the topic Writing an aggregator for active site analytics.

Administrators add the aggregator scripts to pages as required. When they do this, the aggregator is injected into markup of the page the next time it is rendered. You can select the point of injection arbitrarily; for example, this can be just before the closing body tag of the HTML markup. Refer to the following flow graphic:

• How Active Site Analytics data is represented in the portal

  The data for the analysis of user behavior is retrieved from markup embedded in the portal pages.

• Writing an aggregator for active site analytics

  You can write your own scripts to retrieve the data for active site analytics from the portal themes and skins. Such scripts are called aggregators. The portal Tab Menu - Page Builder theme includes two sample aggregators.

• Add an Active Site Analytics aggregator to a portal page

  Portal administrators can manage the aggregators. they can assign an aggregator to one or more portal labels or pages.

• Instrument a theme for Active Site Analytics

  WebSphere Portal provides the Tab Menu - Page Builder theme that is prepared and suitable for use with Active Site Analytics.

  You can also enhance the other portal themes or create your own custom theme to utilize the Active Site Analytics functionality.

• Injecting custom aggregators

  By implementing a new theme extension point, you can apply different approaches to Active Site Analytics.

Parent topic:

Analyzing portal usage data

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