Area: Optimizely Search & Navigation

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Tracking

This topic describes tracking in Episerver Find, and explains how to enable and implement automatic and custom tracking for your solution.

Tracking stores statistical data about search queries submitted by site visitors, and search results that they clicked. The collected statistics can be analyzed, providing administrators with 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.

Automatic tracking

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

Example

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

Track() ensures that the required tracking information is added to the URLs of the search hits. JavaScript is automatically injected in the footer of the page that handles the tracking of the hits.

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.

Note: The client side scripts used for tracking depends on having set the EPiServer.Framework.Web.RenderingTags in the page templates:

<%@ 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>

Custom tracking

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. This requires you to supply required tracking information as querystring parameters in the hit URL.

Tracking querystring 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 contains site and language tags.
_t_ip: Client IP address
_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 need to 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)
```
_t_hit.pos: The hit's ordinal position.

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 querystring parameter above.

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Last updated: Nov 16, 2015