Webtrends - Persisting Values for dcsMultiTrack

[craig_evans]

I've been playing around with the Preserve setting in the Webtrends tag. When setting it to false, where previous values carry over to the next multiTrack call, I am getting more values than I would like. I know that there are a couple ways outside of Tealium that I can manage the persisted values, but I'm wondering if there is a way to do this within Tealium. The catch is that I mainly want this to work for dcsMultiTrack calls, more specifically on external links and document links. Is there a way to persist specific values for the dcsMultiTrack call using Tealium? I'm hoping there is a solution where you can set Preserve to false and then specify which values to persist in a variable. I don't think there is a variable in the Webtrends tag for this, so maybe a combination of extensions would do the job. I haven't had any luck with the extensions so far.

[dan_george]

Hi Craig, You're right that changing Preserve to false is the way to carry values over with a dcsMultiTrack call. Though I'm not aware of a way to only persist specific values. What are you couple of ways that this can be done outside of Tealium? If it's via JavaScript then you should still be able do this by including the logic in a JavaScript extension. With more details I can try to point you in the right direction.

[craig_evans]

Hi Dan, Outside of Tealium we are just setting the values that we don't want to persist to null (or empty string) on the dcsMultiTrack call. It seems like we'll probably need to continue to do this. Example: dcsMultiTrack("key1", "value", "key2", "value2", "unwantedKey1", "", "unwantedKey2", ""); One option would be to try and leverage the jQuery onHandler extension for our link tracking rather than calling dcsMultiTrack directly, although I'm not sure if that would give us what we need. Would we be able to set Preserve to true and then set a variable to itself to accomplish what we need? The idea here is that the variable on the left would be for the multiTrack call and the variable on the right would be from the utag_data object. Is that how it works in that scenario? Another option would be to override the dcsMultiTrack call in the Webtrends tag using a JavaScript extension, where we could nullify specific values. What do you recommend?

[ty_gavin · Accepted solution]

The Tealium approach is to only send data to the tag vendor that is mapped and has a value set. We also "abstract" the individual tag vendor tracking functions with utag.view and utag.link functions. This call: utag.link( {"key1" : "value", "key2" : "value2", "unwantedKey1" : "" , "unwantedKey2" : ""} ); Has the same effect as this: utag.link( {"key1" : "value", "key2" : "value2"} ); Then you would have key1, key2, unwantedKey1, unwantedKey2 mapped in the Webtrends mapping toolbox (inside Tealium.) The tag template will detect that unwanted is not set and it will *not* pass it along to Webtrends. Using Extensions and/or controlling what is set in the "Data Layer" object passed to utag.link is how you control what is then passed along to Webtrends. utag.link(my_object); // my_object has all the data that should be sent

[craig_evans]

I hadn't even thought about that approach. Thanks Ty!

[craig_evans]

Ty, I've implemented this, but it's not actually working as expected with Preserve set to false. None of the values I'm mapping to empty strings are being cleared on the multitrack call.

[craig_evans]

I played around with it a little more, and it looks like you have to use the JS Code option and enter null for it to clear a value.