Patent Application
20080040473
The present invention is described in detail below with reference to the attached drawing figures, which are incorporated by reference herein and wherein:
The subject matter of the present invention is described with specificity herein to meet statutory requirements. However, the description itself is not intended to limit the scope of this patent. Rather, the inventors have contemplated that the claimed subject matter might also be embodied in other ways, to include different steps or combinations of steps similar to the ones described in this document, in conjunction with other present or future technologies. Moreover, although the terms “step” and/or “block” may be used herein to connote different elements of methods employed, the terms should not be interpreted as implying any particular order among or between various steps herein disclosed, unless and except when the order of individual steps is explicitly described.
Referring to
While computing device 10 is shown, other system configurations, including hand-held devices, consumer electronics, general-purpose computers, more specialty computing devices, etc may also be used. With continued reference to
Computing device 10 typically includes a variety of computer-readable media. By way of example, and not limitation, computer-readable media may comprise Random Access Memory (RAM); Read Only Memory (ROM); Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM); flash memory or other memory technologies; CDROM, digital versatile disks (DVD) or other optical or holographic media; magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, carrier wave or any other medium that can be used to encode desired information and be accessed by computing device 10.
Memory 112 includes computer-storage media in the form of volatile and/or nonvolatile memory. The memory may be removable, nonremovable, or a combination thereof. Exemplary hardware devices include solid-state memory, hard drives, optical-disc drives, etc. Computing device 10 includes one or more processors that read data from various entities such as memory 112 or I/O components 120. Presentation component(s) 116 present data indications to a user or other device. Exemplary presentation components include a display device, speaker, printing component, vibrating component, etc.
I/O ports 118 allow computing device 10 to be logically coupled to other devices including I/O components 120, some of which may be built in. Illustrative components include a microphone, joystick, game pad, satellite dish, scanner, printer, wireless device, etc.
Referring now to
Subsequently, as indicated in block 308, user-interaction information is sent to a tracking server according to a call in the modified HTML elements. The modification of the HTML element includes a modification of the default behavior of the element. The default behavior is modified to instruct that user-interaction information be sent in certain situations. The modification of the default behavior of the HTML elements is further described below. In one embodiment, the tracking server may be a third party server that processes data and stores the data in a database. In another embodiment, the tracking server is an internal server. By way of example only, and not by limitation, the data processed and stored by the tracking server may include information about a person requesting the web page (e.g., name, address, weight, height, gender, age, race, education, occupation, etc.), where the request for the web page originated from (e.g., search engine, hyperlink on a web page, typed URL, etc.), and how long the web page was viewed.
Turning now to the modification of the default behavior of the HTML elements, reference is made to
Once a determination is made as to which set of HTML elements are to be modified, at block 404, the default behavior of the determined set of HTML elements is modified to include a call to a tracking server. By way of example only and not limitation, two modified HTML elements are provided below:
The underlying code for the clicktrack.htc includes a call to allow tracking. Again, by way of example only and not limitation, an example of the clicktrack.htc code is:
Using a tag with the modified default behavior will thus result in a call to the tracking server when, for example, a user interacts with an a-tag on the web page. This call will occur without having to enumerate each element on the page, and will occur as the elements are loaded on the page. This allows true web analytic tracking of pages using AJAX. Thus, even though the page has dynamic content, a user's interaction with the page can be determined.
To obtain the benefit of the modified HTML elements, the web developer will use the modified elements in web design. It is beneficial to allow typical web developers to incorporate these modified elements in an easy, unobtrusive way. One method for incorporating the elements is to place the modified HTML elements in the common include file. A server-side include (SSI) file is a tool used in web page creation. The include file allows one master file to be used that can benefit many pages. Then to modify one boilerplate element, only the include file need be modified instead of updating every individual page. By modifying the default behavior of the determined set of HTML elements, web designers can obtain the benefit of web analytic tracking without having to individually modify each HTML element during web page creation. Instead the web page developer need only specify the include file that contains the modified HTML elements.
One with ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that modifying the default behavior of a-tags to included a call to a tracking server will not only modify the a-tags that currently exist on the web page, but any a-tag appearing on the web page thereafter. Further, the code to modify a-tags only needs to be written one time by a developer and placed in the include file. Therefore, any other developer working on features to the web site need only to adopt the common code in the include file to incorporate these changes (i.e.; the modification of the default behavior of a-tags) into a page. Therefore, only one person (the initial developer) needs to know what tags to modify and how to modify the default behavior of these certain tags.
Referring now to
Subsequently, at block 504, information about an event is processed by the tracking server. By way of example only, and not by limitation, processing the information may include, but is not limited to, organizing the information received, storing the information and presenting the information to a user. The presentation of the information may be through an electronic report displayed on a monitor, a printed report, or presented to the user through any other acceptable format. Various ways of presenting information are known to one with ordinary skill in the art and, accordingly, are not further discussed herein.
Referring now to
Architecture 200 includes an administrative computing device 210, a web page development device 212 and a user computing device 214. Device 214 operates as described above with respect to
Administrative computing device 210 is used in the creation of the modified HTML elements. Device 210 is used to alter the default behavior of the HTML elements selected according to the description above with reference to
The present invention has been described in relation to particular embodiments, which are intended in all respects to be illustrative rather than restrictive. Alternative embodiments will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art to which the present invention pertains without departing from its scope.
From the foregoing, it will be seen that this invention is one well adapted to attain all the ends and objects set forth above, together with other advantages which are obvious and inherent to the system and method. It will be understood that certain features and subcombinations are of utility and may be employed without reference to other features and subcombinations. This is contemplated by and is within the scope of the claims.
