Patent Application
20160198015
Site performance has an impact on user engagement and directly impacts conversion metrics. As websites become more sophisticated, browsers have to pull down more resources during page load, resulting in slower site performance. Apart from technically optimizing each page for performance, there are limited options for a marketer to improve site performance. In addition, some caching techniques can result in skewed analytics being collected. For example, some web assets (e.g., images) are commonly used for web analytics, and would thus skew analytical results if they were requested prematurely. Opportunities exist for improvements in the art.
Aspects of the disclosure address one or more of the drawbacks mentioned above by disclosing methods, computer readable media, and apparatuses associated with a tag delivery network that employs one or more aspects of prefetching disclosed herein.
Aspects of the disclosure address one or more of the issues mentioned above by disclosing methods, computer readable media, and apparatuses for a tag management system comprising a networked resource/asset prefetch feature. In one example, the tag management system may involve a tag manager comprising first program instructions configured to regulate execution of analytics tags at the user terminal and second program instructions configured to request and process a prefetch recommendation. The tag manager may executed on a user terminal analytics tags are associated with a web page. Meanwhile, the tag manager may bypass execution of analytics tags in those web pages downloaded/cached as part of a prefetch.
With another aspect of the disclosure, a recommendation system and collection system may communicate with a data store of aggregated data to estimate which web page(s) are likely to be next in a navigation sequence, then generating a prefetch recommendation.
Aspects of the disclosure may be provided in a computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions to perform one or more of the process steps described herein.
This summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the detailed description. The summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended to be used to limit the scope of the claimed subject matter. Moreover, one or more of the steps and/or components described above may be optional or may be combined with other steps.
Systems and methods are illustrated by way of example and are not limited in the accompanying figures in which like reference numerals indicate similar elements and in which:
In light of the foregoing background, the following presents a simplified summary of the present disclosure in order to provide a basic understanding of some aspects of the concepts disclosed herein. This description is not an extensive overview of the invention. This description is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended to be used to limit the scope of the claimed subject matter. This description is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below. It is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and structural and functional modifications may be made.
In accordance with various aspects of the disclosure, methods, computer-readable media, and apparatuses are disclosed involving an enhanced tag management system comprising a networked resource/asset prefetch feature. In some examples, the tag management system comprises a recommendation system, a collection system, a non-volatile data store, a user computing device with cache memory, and/or other components. The enhanced tag management system permits prefetching of resource/assets, such as images, videos, widgets, etc., while avoiding the skewing of analytical results. As a result, a user computing device may enjoy enhanced performance and reduced latency without sacrificing the reliability of collected analytics data.
One example of a tag management system is disclosed in which an entity manages the delivery of content and program instructions that have been customized for each individual and/or web page. This entity (e.g., a web consulting company) may use aspects of the disclosure to route customized content/instructions to a web browser and/or other computer applications. In general, aspects of the disclosure may be used to manipulate existing objects and add new objects to web pages. Within this context, an object may include both visual and non-visual elements on a web page. As part of the content/instruction delivery vehicle, a front-end user interface may facilitate a non-technical user to describe and implement object creation and manipulation. To provide these services, the entity may take advantage of both internal and external computing and storage capabilities. One example of program instructions delivered to a web browser and/or other application includes those related to initiate the capture of web analytics data when a user terminal accesses a client web page. This collected data may include the name of the web page visited, the download time of the web page, a setting of a cookie for the web page, and the movement of a mouse over a particular object (i.e., “mouse overs”) on a web page. In addition, content such as advertisements, modified images, buttons, and other graphics may be customized to a particular user through this service.
Certain embodiments of this disclosure allow for a content/tag management system/method/program executable instructions that is/are referenced with a single line of computer code that is inserted as a single tag and references a JavaScript™ file. The execution of program instructions in the JavaScript™ file may take care of all tag management, updates, configuration changes, and any other customizations that clients may wish to perform. Third-party vendors may be removed from a client website to allow the manager to take responsibility for delivering the correct program instructions/content at the correct time.
In the following description of the various embodiments of the disclosure, reference is made to the accompanying drawings, which form a part hereof, and in which is shown by way of illustration, various embodiments in which the disclosure may be practiced. It is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and structural and functional modifications may be made.
I/O 109 may include a microphone, keypad, touch screen, and/or stylus through which a user of device 101 may provide input, and may also include one or more of a speaker for providing audio output and a video display device for providing textual, audiovisual and/or graphical output. Software may be stored within memory 115 to provide instructions to processor 103 for enabling manager 101 to perform various functions. For example, memory 115 may store software used by the manager 101, such as an operating system 117, application programs 119, and an associated database 121. Processor 103 and its associated components may allow the manager 101 to run a series of computer-readable instructions to deploy program instructions according to the type of request that the manager receives. For instance, if a client requests that program instructions for capturing mouse movements for complete session replay be executed, manager 101 may transmit the appropriate instructions to a user's computer when that user visits the client's website.
The manager 101 may operate in a networked environment supporting connections to one or more remote computers, such as terminals 141 and 151. The terminals 141 and 151 may be personal computers or servers that include many or all of the elements described above relative to the manager 101. Alternatively, terminal 141 and/or 151 may be part of a “cloud” computing environment located with or remote from manager 101 and accessed by manager 101. The network connections depicted in
Additionally, an application program 119 used by the manager 101 according to an illustrative embodiment of the disclosure may include computer executable instructions for invoking functionality related to delivering program instructions and/or content.
Computing device 101 and/or terminals 141 or 151 may also be mobile terminals including various other components, such as a battery, speaker, and antennas (not shown).
The disclosure is operational with numerous other general purpose or special purpose computing system environments or configurations. Examples of well known computing systems, environments, and/or configurations that may be suitable for use with the disclosure include, but are not limited to, personal computers, server computers, hand-held or laptop devices, multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based systems, set top boxes, programmable consumer electronics, network PCs, minicomputers, mainframe computers, and distributed computing environments that include any of the above systems or devices, and the like.
The disclosure may be described in the general context of computer-executable instructions, such as program modules, being executed by a computer. Generally, program modules include routines, programs, objects, components, data structures, etc. that perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. The disclosure may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in both local and remote computer storage media including memory storage devices.
Referring to
Computer network 203 may be any suitable computer network including the Internet, an intranet, a wide-area network (WAN), a local-area network (LAN), a wireless network, a digital subscriber line (DSL) network, a frame relay network, an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, a virtual private network (VPN), or any combination of any of the same. Communications links 202 and 205 may be any communications links suitable for communicating between workstations 201 and server 204, such as network links, dial-up links, wireless links, hard-wired links, etc.
The steps that follow in the Figures may be implemented by one or more of the components in
In some examples, a system is disclosed that results in an improved customer experience by accelerated page-load speeds. Aspects of the disclosed system pre-load web site assets (e.g., images, videos, audio, and other resources) for popular links, thus accelerating performance across a brand's site/domain (or sites/domains). Site performance has an impact on user engagement and directly impacts conversion metrics. As websites become more sophisticated, browsers have to pull down more resources during page load, resulting in slower site performance. Apart from technically optimizing each page for performance, there is little that the marketer can do to improve site performance.
Aspects of the disclosed system track popular (e.g., frequently accessed) URL paths within a brand's domains and calculate the most common paths based on aggregate data. A recommendation system may use at least some of the aggregate data to determine which pages are most likely to be next in a user's navigation sequence. The assets for the recommended pages may be pre-loaded, so that they are stored in the browser's cache. If a user proceeds to navigate to a recommended page, it will load quickly since the browser will already have most of the resources it needs to render the page. The disclosed URL prefetching features may optimize page-load performance across all (or at least some) of a brand's digital properties.
While the disclosure contemplates numerous different approaches to implementing the disclosed system, in one example, the system may be implemented through server-side components, client-side components, and JSON. In addition, the system may be integrated with a tag management system (such as the system described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/843,849) such that the prefetching may avoid skewing analytical result. For example, some web assets (e.g., images) are commonly used for web analytics, and would thus skew analytical results if they were requested prematurely. Part of the elegance of the prefetching design disclosed herein is that it avoids this outcome by way of being deployed through a tag management system (TMS). In a TMS implementation configured in accordance with the features disclosed herein, the analytics resources would be delivered asynchronously, via the TMS. In other words, they are not hard-coded onto the page and therefore would not be prefetched. As a result, the web analytics results would not be skewed as a result of prefetching. For example, see
In addition to, or in lieu of, pre-fetching assets for the likely page a user may go to, in another example, the system may be configured to process and pre-fetch a particular number of top widgets that a user might be interested in viewing/purchasing/etc. In one example, the systems and methods disclosed herein may be integrated with a recommendation engine (e.g., from a book retailer site, toy retailer site, music streaming site, movie streaming site, etc.) to pre-fetch the appropriate content/assets/resources in advance of a user's actual request for such content. As a result, the user experience may be greatly enhanced.
With respect to the step of prefetching the assets/content/resources, in one example, a browser client (e.g., client code executing in a browser) may execute Javascript (or other code) to perform the steps of accessing a data structure (e.g., a JSON value) to identify one or more recommended URLs to prefetch, getting the HTML web page corresponding to the URL, and then downloading/pre-fetching the appropriate resources/assets identified in the received HTML web page. Some illustrative pseudo-code (with various portions redacted/abbreviated for ease of readability) includes:
In addition, the system may be configured as to when the prefetching may be performed. For example, the system may be configured so that prefetching does not interfere with the user's normal web experience. In one example, an administrator/user may provide rules in advance to configure the prefetching to occur after a “window.onload” occurs. Meanwhile, a different administrator may configure his/her site/sites to perform prefetching at a different time or upon an occurrence of an event/trigger.
In the pseudo-code above for pre-fetching, the steps are performed upon one or more recommended URLs for prefetching. The recommended URLs may be received from a remote server (e.g., a recommendation server) as data (e.g., JSON data) and then parsed/processed at the browser client to prepare for prefetching. Some illustrative pseudo-code (with various portions redacted/abbreviated for ease of readability) includes:
In the aforementioned example, JSON data may be received from the remote server to the browser client. The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) standard formats human-readable text into name-value pairs to transmit data objects between a server and web applications. JSON is sometimes used in conjunction with, or in lieu of, XML. JSON is a language-independent data format and may be parsed/generated using various different programming languages, including JavaScript and other languages. In other examples, other data formats may be used to transmit information between the remote server and browser client.
After the browser client has caused the browser to download and pre-fetch particular assets/resources, the browser software itself may cache the downloaded assets in cache memory (e.g., volatile memory). At a later time, when the browser requires particular assets, the browser may check the cache memory to determine if that asset has already been downloaded and cached. In some examples, the browser may also check whether the asset is stale by, for example, checking the “last modified” date on the server against that of the asset in the cache. Other techniques may be used to confirm the staleness/freshness of a cache. Once freshness is confirmed, the browser may access the cache memory to retrieve the asset/resource instead of downloading it from a remote server. As a result, the user experience may be improved.
Although browser software has been described in the preceding example, the disclosure is not so limited. Any client software/hardware may be used to implement the steps disclosed herein, including but not limited to firmware executing in a settop box, software executing in a gaming console, an operating system executing on a smartphone, and other examples. In short, the client need not necessarily be tied to a browser, however, so long as particular features relied upon in a browser, such as the ability to cache an asset and later pull from that cache instead of re-downloading an asset, are also included in the replacement of the browser.
Complementary to the prefetching and caching capabilities described herein, the system may also include collection and recommendation capabilities, as illustrated in
When data is received by the collection system including information about what sequences are followed by a user (e.g., a user transitions from a first URL to a second URL), that data is received, processed, and/or stored by a collection system. Some illustrative pseudo-code (with various portions redacted/abbreviated for ease of readability) that may execute at the collection system server includes:
Consequently, the received data (e.g., JSON content) may be parsed/processed and then stored in a data store. Meanwhile, a recommendation system, as illustrated in
An illustrative value of prefetech recommendation data may include: “[\“http://www.acmestore.com/store\”, \“https://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/CheckOfferEligibility\”,\“https://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/DisplayDownloadHistoryPageA”, \“https://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/DisplayEditProfPageA”, \“http://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/DisplayMainPage \”, \“http://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/cat/Office/categoryID.01234\”,\“http://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/cat/categoryID.01288\”,\“https://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/DisplayAccountOrderPageA”, \“http://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/DisplayHelpContactPageA”, \“https://www.acmestore.com/store/usa/en_US/DisplayCheckoutAddressPaymentPage/choose.payment/errorCode.payment\”]”
For example, in some examples the data store may be formatted as SQL tables or other database format. In other examples, the data store may store JSON and use that information for a session that represents a user's visit. For example the below excerpt is a redacted portion from one session for an illustrative website visitor. As illustrated below, the JSON information may include more than just the next URL for prefetching, it may include various parameters and other information that may assist the recommendation system in computing:
Aspects of the invention have been described in terms of illustrative embodiments thereof. Numerous other embodiments, modifications and variations within the scope and spirit of the appended claims will occur to persons of ordinary skill in the art from a review of this disclosure. For example, one of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that the steps illustrated in the illustrative figures may be performed in other than the recited order, and that one or more steps illustrated may be optional in accordance with aspects of the invention.
In various examples, the following methods/apparatuses/systems are described:
First, a method comprising one or more of the following steps:
Second, another method comprising one or more of the following steps:
Third, a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable program instructions stored thereon that when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform one or more of the method steps described above.
Fourth, an apparatus comprising: (1) a processor, and (2) a memory having stored therein computer executable instructions, that when executed by the processor, cause the apparatus to perform one or more of the method steps described above.
This application is a continuation of and claims the benefit of priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/683,352 (Attorney Docket No. 007662.00054), filed Apr. 10, 2015, which claims priority from U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/978,814 (Attorney Docket No. 007662.00044), filed Apr. 11, 2014, both of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entireties. In one example, a system including one or more of the features described herein may be built upon or incorporate aspects of a tag delivery system as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/843,849 (Attorney Docket No. 007662.00019), which published as U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2013/0290480 on Oct. 30, 2013, which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 61978814 | Apr 2014 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 14683352 | Apr 2015 | US |
| Child | 15069414 | US |
