Page view tag

The HCL 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 HCL 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 your HCL 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 HCL 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 Configuring 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, you must include more parameters to communicate search-related data to an external analytics system:

  • If your site uses the com.ibm.commerce.search.beans.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 your store does not use the CatEntrySearchListDataBean, or you do not get an instance of the CatEntrySearchListDataBean in your search results page, use both of the following parameters:
    srchKeyword
    This parameter communicates the search keyword that is 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 you might need to generate some custom report that requires more information.
There are multiple ways to pass values by 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 : Use the extraparms parameter to pass either Explore attributes, or data for custom 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 you 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, you 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. You 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

HCL Commerce provides two versions of the page view tag:

  1. An abstract base tag implementation class: com.ibm.commerce.bi.taglib.CommonBaseTag. Analytics vendors who want to provide a page view tag in their web analytics JSP tag library for HCL 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.