CommonWeb

Deprecation Notice

CommonWeb is deprecated, instead use the Keen Tracking.js library https://github.com/keen/keen-tracking.js

CommonWeb is an open source JavaScript library that transforms common web user activity into a stream of event data you can listen to and analyze. CommonWeb listens for:

Pageviews
Clicks
Form Submissions
More...

And emits a JSON representation of each, loaded with useful properties.

The data emitted by CommonWeb can be used to compute traditional web metrics like:

Visits and Visitors
Time on Site
Bounce Rate
Content Ranking
…and more

CommonWeb supports integrations with services like Keen IO that provide tools for analyzing and reporting on streams of event data.

Philosophy

CommonWeb is more of a collection tool than an analysis tool. The philosophy behind CommonWeb is that data collection is hard, but 80% of what needs to be collected is common to everybody, and auto-collecting the 80% can enable a lot of basic reporting.

The analysis of the data, on the other hand, varies widely based on what you're trying to learn about your users and how your product or web site works. For example, exactly how you define a cohort might be very different than the company next door.

CommonWeb:

Automatically collects the 80% of interesting web events and properties
Lets you customize or add new events and properties (the 20% specific to you)
Send data to configurable back-ends or fire JavaScript callbacks

CommonWeb's job is to capture web analytics data in a consistent but configurable fashion. Consistency has its advantages. For example, reporting tools built with commmon-web in mind can be useful to anyone!

Already a Keen IO user?

Hooray! <3 <3 CommonWeb can help level up your web analytics game. It might allow you to pare down old tracking code, or just learn something new about your users.

CommonWeb is not a replacement for keen-js. Rather, it sits on top of it, while providing a data model and higher level abstractions than addEvent.

Installation

Download common-web.min.js from this repository into your project and include it on your pages.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/common-web.min.js"></script>

Make sure to change /javascripts/common-web.min.js if that's not where the file is in your project.

Dependencies

jQuery – Required. Someday this may change, but for now jQuery is required.
Keen IO JS SDK v3 - Required if you're using Keen as a backend for the JSON data captured.

Include dependencies before including common-web.min.js itself. For example, here's how you'd include both jQuery and Keen IO:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/keen-js@3"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="common-web.min.js"></script>

If you're using the Keen IO backend, you'll need to tell CommonWeb about the Keen.Client instance you'd like it to use to record events and tell it to use the CommonWeb.Keen callback:

CommonWeb.Keen.Client = new Keen({
  projectId: "your_project_id",
  writeKey: "your_write_key"
});
CommonWeb.addGlobalProperties(CommonWeb.Keen.globalProperties);
CommonWeb.Callback = CommonWeb.Keen.Callback;

Usage

After all of the required JavaScript has been loaded, you can begin making calls to the CommonWeb object.

The CommonWeb API contains several trackXXX methods that initialize tracking for pageviews or events on specific HTML elements. Here's an example of each:

// add a user-specific GUID to all events for tracking user flow
CommonWeb.trackSession();

// track the pageview
CommonWeb.trackPageview();

// track clicks for each link on the page
CommonWeb.trackClicks();

// track submissions for every form on the page
CommonWeb.trackFormSubmissions();

// track changes to every input on the page
CommonWeb.trackInputChanges();

// track clicks for non-link tags on the page, requires argument
CommonWeb.trackClicksPassive($("span"));

Blocking vs. Non-Blocking

Most links (<a> tags) unload pages when they are clicked because the user is being taken to a new page. Same with traditional, non-ajax form submissions. If the page unloads before a call to record the event is finished the event may not be recorded. This is a common issue in web analytics that often goes unnoticed to the detriment of accurate data.

CommonWeb's solution is to have you specify explicitly when to work around this scenario; i.e. to tell CommonWeb what links / forms are going to unload the page. In that case CommonWeb will prevent the default browser action, record the event with the backend, and then re-initiate the action.

The methods that alter default behavior. Here they are:

trackClicks
trackFormSubmissions

These methods are more passive, and don't interrupt any normal event flow:

trackClicksPassive
trackInputChanges
trackFormSubmissionsPassive (coming soon)

Specify HTML Elements (Recommended)

If you only want certain elements tracked, pass them in as the first argument to the track methods:

// track clicks on the nav
CommonWeb.trackClicks($(".nav a"));

// track clicks with a specific attribute
CommonWeb.trackClicks($("a[data-track=true]"));

// track changes to number inputs
CommonWeb.trackInputChanges($("input[type='number']"));

The same arguments work for tracking non-link-clicks and forms:

CommonWeb.trackClicksPassive($("span.less"));
CommonWeb.trackFormSubmissions($("form"));

Words of Caution

CommonWeb is designed to make tracking automatic, but the design is also aware that tracking certain elements may not be desired, or worse, may cause unexpected behavior.

That's why, at least for now, explicitly passing the elements you care about is preferred over grabbing everything.

And be careful not to wire up the same element twice!

Specify Additional Properties

The default data model used to represent events is described in another section below. Sometimes you may need to include more properties. For example, maybe you need to include extra user properties that allow for further segmenting analysis down the road.

This can be done at a global level or for specific elements passed into track calls.

Here's how to add global properties that will be merged into each captured event on the page:

CommonWeb.addGlobalProperties({
  experiment: {
    id: 13983,
    variant: "A"
  }
});

Here's how to specific properties that will only be added to a specific element's click:

CommonWeb.trackClicks($("span.less"), { another: "property" });

You can also pass a function to compute properties lazily at the time of the event:

CommonWeb.trackClicksPassive($("span.even-more-stuff"), function (event, element) {
    return {
        event: { clientX : event.clientX },
        element: { tagNameAgain : element.tagName  }
    };
});

Custom Backend

Eventually multiple backends will be supported, but for now a Backend is just a function and you can specify your own just like this:

CommonWeb.Callback = function(collection, properties, callback) {
  // do something with the event here!
};

Data Model - Event Types

CommonWeb identifies several event types based on the interaction

pageviews, clicks, form-submissions. The event type is added to the JSON payload that represents each event so it can be used in analysis.

Data Model - Event Properties

Global

These properties are sent with every event by default:

page_url - The window.location.href of the current page
referrer_url - The document.referrer of the current page

Events and Elements

JavaScript event and HTML element objects are turned into JSON structures and places at the event and element top level keys respectively.

Session Tracking

You can have CommonWeb generate a user-specific GUID that will be sent along with all of your CommonWeb events. This GUID will be stored in the user's cookies (and persist for one year), so you can relate future events to the same user. Turn on session tracking like this:

CommonWeb.trackSession();

trackSession will also accept two arguments: the first is the name of the cookie to use. The second is the GUID to use, if there isn't already one stored. Pass them in like this:

CommonWeb.trackSession('custom_guid_cookie', 'semi-random-user-identifier');

Keen Backend

More documentation needed here

Here's an example clicks event that shows what properties are collected:

[
  {
    "parsed_user_agent": {
      "device": {
        "family": "Other"
      },
      "os": {
        "major": "10",
        "patch_minor": null,
        "minor": "9",
        "family": "Mac OS X",
        "patch": "3"
      },
      "browser": {
        "major": "36",
        "minor": "0",
        "family": "Chrome",
        "patch": "1985"
      }
    },
    "referrer_info": {
      "medium" : "SEARCH",
      "source" : "http://google.com/",
      "term" : "analytics"
    },
    "parsed_page_url": {
      "path": "/docs/data-collection",
      "domain": "keen.io",
      "protocol": "https",
      "anchor": null,
      "query_string": {
        "page": "1",
        "term": "analytics"
      }
    },
    "element": {
      "style": "color: blue",
      "text": "Data Enrichment",
      "id": "link-0",
      "href": "/docs",
      "tagName": "A",
      "path": "html > body > p > a#link-0.classy.classy2.classy3",
      "classes": [
        "classy",
        "classy2",
        "classy3"
      ],
      "class": "classy classy2 classy3"
    },
    "keen": {
      "timestamp": "2014-08-12T09:19:28.605Z",
      "created_at": "2014-08-12T09:19:28.605Z",
      "id": "53e9dc20c9e163024bc2c799"
    },
    "referrer_url": "",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36",
    "ip_geo_info": {
      "province": "California",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "postal_code": "94103",
      "continent": "North America",
      "country": "United States"
    },
    "ip_address": "199.247.206.130",
    "event": {
      "metaKey": false,
      "type": "click"
    },
    "page_url": "https://keen.io/docs/data-collection",
    "guid": "e54029e7-6a54-b39f-c592-022686afb9c9"
  }
]

Further Documentation and Examples

Example Page w/ Keen IO Backend

Open index.html after cloning this project and head to the console. It will prompt you first to fill out Keen IO project information so that there's somewhere to capture your events. The annoying pop-ups will go away once you've put that in. It's there so that you don't have to hand edit the file and then accidentally end up checking your credentials in.

The example page shows you a variety of elements. You can click on each and see the event generated by viewing the JavaScript console.

Contributing

Setup

CommonWeb uses Gulp for building, so you will need to have Node.js installed. You can get up and running with the standard npm flow:

npm install

If you don't already have Gulp installed, you will need to install that globally.

npm install --global gulp

Building

You can build by calling the build Gulp task.

gulp build

You can also setup automatica rebuilds whenever a file changes by starting a watch. This can either be done directly with Gulp, or with the npm hook.

gulp

# or

npm start

Wishlist

Tests
Timeout and continue if a backend takes too long
Session ID and session age properties
Capture even more common interactions (e.g. time on page)
Create dashboards and visualizations based on this data!
AJAX Form Handling

keen/common-web

keen

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