ClickTracks?

[andrewgoodman]

So I notice SEW Forums is using ClickTracks, hmmm....? It accesses the ClickTracks site when I click on stuff.

[rustybrick]

Then I will stop clicking on stuff. ;)

[Jeremy_Goodrich]

For some reason, I alwasy thought that such things as javascript calls to external servers for tracking were supposed to be included at the bottom of the code, right above the </body> </html> tags?

Reason being, you don't want to count people that only load part of the doc, then click the back button - as with the js call in the top, the server will record the data before the page is fully loaded?

Or am I off my rocker?

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Reason being, you don't want to count people that only load part of the doc, then click the back button - as with the js call in the top, the server will record the data before the page is fully loaded?

It is, unfortunately, not exactly the way it works. We did some extensive testings on this some time ago and the way a browser load each part of a page - and how it devide those parts, are different from browser to browser and from one OS to another. There are no way you can control the order and time it takes to lead each part of the page, so even if your tracking code is in the end of your HTML is may not load last.

Most people don't know this and I even seen some market monitor systems have it as a requirement that the code is by the end of the HTML (that was in fact the original reason it was investigated here).

If anyone have evidence that you can control the order of how each part of a page load in any browser please let me know :)

[dannysullivan]

So I notice SEW Forums is using ClickTracks, hmmm....? It accesses the ClickTracks site when I click on stuff.

Yep -- we've used it on the main site for several months and finally got it installed here on the forums. If you click on any page in the site, that will get recorded. The same thing is true, of course, if we didn't have ClickTracks. We'd see the clicks in our regular web logs. If you click out of the site, we don't know where you've gone, though. We aren't doing click-capture of outbound links. Overall, it's a great program for understanding path behavior.