Event Components

Trigger

An event can be triggered in any of the following situations, which are listed in the order of occurrence during a visitor session:

Trigger

Description

First Hit of Session

Evaluated when a new visitor's session begins.

Every Hit

Evaluated before any part of a new hit is evaluated.

After Every Hit

Evaluated after all parts of a hit are evaluated.

Last Hit

Evaluated after the last hit of the session is captured and evaluated.

End of Session

Evaluated when a visitor's session ends, either as defined by event or system timeout.

Triggers are defined in the Event Wizard of the Discover Event Manager.

Conditions

The condition defines the event, hit attribute, or session attribute that is searched in the session data. This data element is evaluated against criteria you define to yield a true or false value.

The conditions are evaluated at the Trigger time and are based on the context. There are two contexts: one for the hit triggers and one at session end.

• Hit conditions include any text patterns in the current hit, the existence or value of any event that occurs in the session, or any session attributes defined.
• Event conditions exclude the ability to evaluate hit attributes that occur in any hit but include support for the other conditions.

Evaluation criteria depend on the type of data.

• Conditions that evaluate numeric data have comparison and equivalency operators, null tests, and inclusion/exclusion tests. You can test first, last, count, and found patterns of the numeric data.
• Conditions that evaluate text data have equivalency operators, null tests, and inclusion/exclusion tests.

Conditions that evaluate as true cause the action that is specified in the event to be taken.

Conditions are defined in the Event Wizard of the Discover Event Manager.

Event dependencies

As part of the configuration of the conditions for an event, you can require the presence of another event or event value, which creates an event dependency.

There are two available methods for creating dependencies between events:

• Implicit dependency - Discover events can be triggered at the start of session, first page, end of page, on the last page or at the end of the session. These discrete points of evaluation can be used to create implied dependencies. For example, you can guarantee that any event configured to trigger on the last page can reference the output that is generated by any event that is triggered at the start of the session.
• Explicit dependency - As one of the conditions of the event, you can specify that another event or event value must be present. Explicit dependencies are only valid between events that share a trigger point. For example, an event that is configured to be triggered at Every Hit cannot reference events that are triggered at Last Hit.

Explicit dependencies can be reviewed through the Discover Event Manager.

Action

In the event action, a value can be stored when the event occurs, which can be the count of the event that occurs, the text or numeric string that is obtained with a hit attribute, or the contents of a previous event value or a session attribute.

The action defines:

• The value or values that are recorded.
• Values that are tracked for recording are defined in the Event Summary of the Event Wizard of the Event Manager.
• Values that are recorded are defined in the Value step of the Event Wizard of the Event Manager.
• The availability of the data for search and reporting.

Actions are defined in the More Options step of the Event Wizard of the Discover Event Manager.

The report group or groups that are associated with the event. The reports groups that are associated with the event are defined in the Report Groups step of the Event Wizard of the Discover Event Manager.