2013-11-04

Adding click tracking to SiteSeeker

If you are developing and implementing a SiteSeeker solution you are going to want to have click tracking functionality. Click tracking allows for the customer to see what searches actually generate clicks, since there might be a lot of searches that are dismissed (for instance by a new search) by the user.

Adding click tracking to SiteSeeker is quite a trivial thing to do. It is also absolutely necessary to have it installed since it allows for a more qualitative statistics follow up.

Steps

  1. First thing to do is to make sure that the click tracking javascript is loaded. This is done by calling the proper helper function. Add the following helper reference to your search page, or wherever it is you're loading the SiteSeeker javascripts:
    <%= helper.SiteSeeker_ClickTracking_Javascripts() %>
  2. Secondly, add the following within and at the top of the <body> tag:
    <input name="si" type="hidden" value="5CA571D509C386C581222CE02EB84FB1" />
  3. You also have to make sure that search result hits are rendered something like this:
    <div class="ess-searchResult" name="ess-responseId-XXXX">
    <ol>
    <li><a class="ess-hitLink" name="ess-hitNumber-XXXX" href="http://mysite.se/link1/" title="link1">Link 1</a></li>
    </ol>
    </div>
    This is done automatically if you use the standard result helper (helper.Result()). You're probably using a custom HTML helper for this which means you have to put the click tracking references there yourself. Note that ess-searchResult, ess-responseId-XXXX, ess-hitLink and ess-hitNumber-XXXX are necessary to render using those exact names.
The click tracking shows up in the SiteSeeker statistics. The image text is in Swedish; "Klick (%)" is the click percentage for each and every search term. If all of the click percentages show 0% something has gone wrong in the implementation. However, according to SiteSeeker it could take as long as 24 hours for clicks to get registered.

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