Posts

Tracking Events and Properties Naming Conventions and Best Practice

Tracking has 2 parts, the event and the properties of the event and captured together will tell you what users are doing. Data Step 1 Event Naming Best Practice: Object & Action in past tense with "Title Casing" and spacing, eg "Product Added" where Product is the Object and Added is the Action Data Step 2 Event Property: Be consistency, use nouns and use snake_case (just stay that way), and do not nest properties, most downstream providers can use nested properties. This is what tells us what people are doing on the event.  Data Step 3 As a further clarity and to avoid having hundreds of events, the event names should be generalized and then the properties should be used for specificity, else you could end up with lets say  Product Added from Contact Page Product Added from List Page Product Added from Recommendation Or  just "Product Added", with a property of say "source" Think an example like this:  Event Name "Product Added" Pr
Post a Comment
Read more

Lucee vs Adobe ColdFusion columnList vs getColumnList vs getmetadata

I have a general section which dynamically displays reports, which are preconfigured in a certain way.  There are some totals and data rows which are not part of the metrics so net result is I had some CF code looking at the column lists and displaying appropriately.  Turns out there are very different results between Lucee and Adobe Coldfusion, for this example, it's important to create a sample table like so:  CREATE TABLE testtable( [Col1] [varchar](50) NULL, [ACol2] [varchar](50) NULL ) so that ACol2 is actually alphabetically before Col1.  Then run this <cfquery datasource="aTestDSN" name="qry"> select * from testtable </cfquery> <cfset columns = ""> <cfloop array="#getmetadata(qry)#" item="aryItem"> <cfset columns = listappend(columns, aryItem.Name)> </cfloop> <table> <tr><td>getmetadata</td><td><cfoutput>#columns#</cfoutput></td></tr&
Post a Comment
Read more

Hold on, did I say you could email me? Subscriptions, abandon carts

Card Abandonment processes and the law We've all been on a website, added something to cart, maybe even started the checkout where you (gasp) put your email or cellphone and are about to pay when ... life gets in the way. Now, what happens next... the busy marketer on the website has been in contact / went to lunch with a cool start up which has learnt how to capture keystrokes on the web page and has unknowingly to you saved your details to a 3rd party system in possibly another country with different laws, and different protection. The plan... hit you up with a marketing email phrased as an cart abandonment, even may through in a 10% discount code. What does GDPR have to say about this? Who knows, probably something - but it's a long document. What does the busy marketer have to say? Nothing, wasn't aware it was a problem, that guy I met lunch said it was good and it only costs me $1500 a month and he said I could get 10 times my investment back. Let's loo
Post a Comment
Read more

Email lists, bulk emailing, the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, SNDS or JMRP who knows

Is it the SPF? Is it DKIM, SNDS or JMRP, its DMARC right, no wait.. damn, just who knows.  So your trying to send an emails a lot, or an bulk email and whoops, it's not right. Anyway, here's the 10 point plan that can help Step 1 SPF Make sure your SPF only lets who you say can send email on your behalf. Step 2 DKIM DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) - bit tricky and hard to handle the responses, but if there google will love you especially at the their postmaster tools area  https://postmaster.google.com/ . Step 3 SNDS and JMRP SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) & JMRP Junk Mail Reporting Program- this is sort of the same thing now. Step 4 DMARC Yep, that too - Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance Step 5 Static IP If you can, get your own IP, take it slow and warm it up and don't let anyone else use it. Step 6 Wait, where did I get these emails? Your going to ensure that as you build your list that it grows properly
Post a Comment
Read more

All star rich snippets review for a listing vs a review page

The question Suppose you have a listing page/ search results screen. Suppose you have dozens of reviews for your products. Should you pop those said reviews on the listing page? After all the listing page is even more dull and less likely to change than the product, so wouldn't reviews be great in there? The desired result At the end of the day, the main reason for reviews and rich snippets on Google SERP is .... to get people to click through. Facts: The most important factor for organic traffic is SERP ranking CTR on paid search DOES NOT impact SERP rankings. Stars/ price rich snippets will impact CTR So mainly if a listing page may not have rich snippets, then you won't get data structure (outside of things like site links) Unknown Facts It's a general hypothesis that bounce rates, time on site and conversion rates impact the best user experience. So, if users click onto a site because of compelling rich snippets and then awe sucks that's crap, b
Post a Comment
Read more

Bulk checking of URLs for status codes with headmasterseo

I'm always after bulk checking of URL status and what should/ shouldn't be happening on a site, given all the redirects/ logic/ status of products etc. headmasterseo.com/  is a great tool that can quickly check URLs in bulk for status code, redirect details, response time, response headers and HTTP header fields. Free for 500 urls and really not that expensive for bigger plans. Bear in mind, it can crash servers due to the way it seems to run in parallel, so if your server has unknow exposure to this, your boss won't be happy as you'll have just DOSd the live site!
Post a Comment
Read more

Social Media Logins and Account based systems

So you want a sign in account based thingo for your Acme website with the old social logins and maybe even a roll your own one for those who don't trust your linking to any of these social companies. Seems simple enough, but there are some interesting side things that can happen. Suppose you are on Facebook, Google and Hotmail (whatever it's called) even Twitter and Linkedin. If you are one of those types who has a different email for each service, then thanks and good luck that's your problem, every time you sign up/in, you'll be given a new account by our Acme company. If you do have an email address that follows you round, then shouldn't you not care about who is validates that it's you? Sure, you shouldn't care, so said user then doesn't need to remember whether they signed on with Facebook / Google/ Linkedin or whatever. So how do we achieve that? well at some point, you have to have 1 metric which you deem to be the identifier. Not nece
Post a Comment
Read more