Had a hard time finding anything in the Webtrends documentation on RSS and Podcasts tracking so I just gave them a call. Here's what they had to say about the matter:
Affected Environments:
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Question:
How can podcasts be tracked with webtrends.
Issue:
A link to a podcast is generally an XML file pointing to the location of the download.
Resolution:
By implementing SDC, and putting a call to the dcs.gif file in the podcast Description (XML file) so that the DCSURI=PODCAST:/location, the podcast will put a hit in the SDC logs when it's downloaded.
No modification to the js tag is necessary.
DCSMultitrack is not necessary.
Results will be seen in the Pages report.
EXAMPLE:
add the dcs.gif call
IMG SRC =" http://statse.webtrendslive.com/dcsttpy38dbdgj15hs4peh2gr_7t5l/dcs.gif?dcsuri=PODCAST:/WhitepapersAndGuides/&WT.ti=PODCAST:/WhitepapersAndGuides/MeasuringWeb20Technologies&dcssip=www.webtrends.com&wt.rss=aggregatorRequest&dcsext.podcastname=MeasuringWeb20Technologies"
in the podcast Description, supplementing the title and information used to describe how the podcast is identified.
Supported product versions:
WebTrends Analytics 8.x with SmartSource Data Collector
Solution:
When tracking an RSS feed, there are basically 3 events that we can track.
1. Tracking the feed itself, that is, how many times the feed went out an aggregator. We can get this by standard log file analysis from whatever server distributes the feeds. Simply edit the link that goes out to your content, (something like blah/blah2/feed.aspx?param1=foo¶m2=bar) and look for them in the logs. This may or may not be a useful statistic for you as it's going to cost a lot of page views, and it only tells you how many times the aggregators grabbed the feed from your server, not how many times it was viewed or clicked on.
2. Tracking article views. To do this you'll need a functioning SDC server. What we do here is simply insert a dcs.gif request of some type in the article description that goes out. When the article description is viewed in a tool that allows java, you can actually use the whole tag itself, in other viewers you may have to just accept using a hard coded dcs.gif request similar to the noscript portion of a standard tag (you'll loose the visitor tracking benefits of the SDC tag since we're not setting any cookies then, but you'll at least log a hit). Some viewers don't even allow images to load, so in that case we've got no way to track the article view.
3. Tracking article clickthroughs from the viewer to the article page. To do this, simply tag the target page with an SDC tag, and include whatever parameters you want in the link from the article description to the target page (for example, WT.rss=rss). You can then use whatever parameter based reporting you want in WebTrends to track this.
We can also use dcsmultitrack code to bind on-click events within the article description to track clickthroughs of different links and distinguish views from the aggregator from someone who bookmarks the link from their end browser.
Affected Environments:
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Question:
How can podcasts be tracked with webtrends.
Issue:
A link to a podcast is generally an XML file pointing to the location of the download.
Resolution:
By implementing SDC, and putting a call to the dcs.gif file in the podcast Description (XML file) so that the DCSURI=PODCAST:/location, the podcast will put a hit in the SDC logs when it's downloaded.
No modification to the js tag is necessary.
DCSMultitrack is not necessary.
Results will be seen in the Pages report.
EXAMPLE:
add the dcs.gif call
IMG SRC =" http://statse.webtrendslive.com/dcsttpy38dbdgj15hs4peh2gr_7t5l/dcs.gif?dcsuri=PODCAST:/WhitepapersAndGuides/&WT.ti=PODCAST:/WhitepapersAndGuides/MeasuringWeb20Technologies&dcssip=www.webtrends.com&wt.rss=aggregatorRequest&dcsext.podcastname=MeasuringWeb20Technologies"
in the podcast Description, supplementing the title and information used to describe how the podcast is identified.
Supported product versions:
WebTrends Analytics 8.x with SmartSource Data Collector
Solution:
When tracking an RSS feed, there are basically 3 events that we can track.
1. Tracking the feed itself, that is, how many times the feed went out an aggregator. We can get this by standard log file analysis from whatever server distributes the feeds. Simply edit the link that goes out to your content, (something like blah/blah2/feed.aspx?param1=foo¶m2=bar) and look for them in the logs. This may or may not be a useful statistic for you as it's going to cost a lot of page views, and it only tells you how many times the aggregators grabbed the feed from your server, not how many times it was viewed or clicked on.
2. Tracking article views. To do this you'll need a functioning SDC server. What we do here is simply insert a dcs.gif request of some type in the article description that goes out. When the article description is viewed in a tool that allows java, you can actually use the whole tag itself, in other viewers you may have to just accept using a hard coded dcs.gif request similar to the noscript portion of a standard tag (you'll loose the visitor tracking benefits of the SDC tag since we're not setting any cookies then, but you'll at least log a hit). Some viewers don't even allow images to load, so in that case we've got no way to track the article view.
3. Tracking article clickthroughs from the viewer to the article page. To do this, simply tag the target page with an SDC tag, and include whatever parameters you want in the link from the article description to the target page (for example, WT.rss=rss). You can then use whatever parameter based reporting you want in WebTrends to track this.
We can also use dcsmultitrack code to bind on-click events within the article description to track clickthroughs of different links and distinguish views from the aggregator from someone who bookmarks the link from their end browser.
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