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Tracking

Describes tracking in Optimizely Search & Navigation and how to enable and implement automatic and custom tracking for your solution.

Tracking stores statistical data about search queries submitted by site visitors, and the results they clicked. The collected statistics can be analyzed, giving administrators deeper insight into the search's efficiency. The statistics help identify areas of improvement and optimization so more relevant content can be provided to visitors. To learn how to leverage tracking data to improve search relevance, see Auto Boosting.

Automatic tracking

The recommended way to enable automatic tracking is to call Track() on the search query.

📘

Note

In support of website visitors that do not want to be tracked, the system will look at the Do Not Track (DNT) header of incoming requests, and ignore tracking for visitors for which DNT is enabled.

Example

SearchClient.Instance.UnifiedSearchFor(searchQuery).Track().GetResult()

Track() ensures that the required tracking information is added to the URLs of the search hits.

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Note

The client side scripts used for tracking require EPiServer.Framework.Web.RenderingTags in the page templates.

Example

<%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="EPiServer.Framework.Web" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="EPiServer.Framework.Web.Mvc.Html" %>
<html>
  <head runat="server">
    ...
    <%= Html.RequiredClientResources(RenderingTags.Header) %>
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
    <%= Html.RequiredClientResources(RenderingTags.Footer)%>
  </body>
</html>

When using Unified Search, Track() enables tracking of a query and its hits. When using Track() on a non-Unified Search, only query tracking is enabled. Use custom tracking (explained below) to track hits with a non-Unified Search.

Custom tracking

See also the blog post How to do custom query and click tracking with EPiServer Find.

To implement a custom tracking mechanism, use the StatisticsClient, which offers two methods: TrackQuery() and TrackHit().

Access the StatisticsClient as follows:

SearchClient.Instance.Statistics().TrackQuery(...)
SearchClient.Instance.Statistics().TrackHit(...)

Use TrackQuery() to track the user query. It returns a TrackQueryResult with the TrackId.

Use the TrackId returned from TrackQuery() to track hits through the existing JavaScript. You typically implement this with a non-Unified Search, and must manually enable hit tracking. You must supply the required tracking information as query string parameters in the hit URL.

Tracking query string parameters

  • \_t\_id – TrackId, returned from client.Statistics().TrackQuery(...).
  • \_t\_q  – The search query string.
  • \_t\_tags – Tags for categorization of the collected data. Normally, it contains site and language tags.
  • \_t\_hit.id – The expected format for a hit ID. (hitId argument to StatisticsClient.TrackHit) is the type name used in the index and the ID of the document in the index separated by a slash. Example: EPiServer_Templates_Alloy_Models_Pages_ProductPage/_cb1b190b-ec66-4426-83fb24546e24136c_en

When SearchHit<T> objects (from GetResult) are available, combine the SearchHit.Type and SearchHit.Id properties for the appropriate search hit.

If you instead must construct this value based on only the object that was indexed, use this syntax:

client.Conventions.TypeNameConvention.GetTypeName(myObj.GetType()) + "/" + client.Conventions.IdConvention.GetId(myObj)

TrackHit()

TrackHit() tracks a search hit; it provides click tracking. TrackHit() takes a query and hit ID as parameters. The hit ID parameter format matches the \_t\_hit.id parameter above.

Related blog post: How to do custom query and click tracking with EPiServer Find.