• Register
• Log in

Spill

R/GA teaches Tanagram about RIA analytics via Nike+

Greetings and Salutations,

Our last post stated that the Nike+ site didn’t have an analytics engine running under the hood and I’m happy to say Heidi MS and the fine folks at R/GA have corrected us. In the process we got our learn on too. I’m going to share the dialog so that all may benefit from our interaction. Thanks again Heidi! We are huge fans!

Here is Heidi’s response:

“Thanks for your reply. I am glad to learn about the plugin since I didn’t know of it. I googled a bit but couldn’t find anything.

Here’s the kicker – The results you are seeing (NO CP) are misleading. Why do I know this? I’ve been tracking websites for over ten years and I happen to be analyst on the Nike account at R/GA. All of Nike’s sites, including the new Nike+ site are tracked with Omniture. All the pages in your post are tagged at this point. We wouldn’t dream of launching a website for a major corporation without tracking.

If you want to see if a website is tracked and the tracking tool used, I recommend you use a sniffer/debugger such as HTTP Watch or Charles. They won’t fail you.

And I agree with everything you had to say about tracking behavior.  

Heidi “

Heidi reminded us that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) do not use the same tracking technology as HTML based applications. RIA can interact with web services without a full page refresh. That’s part of why they are so cool and also don’t require Counter Pixels (CP) for traffic analysis. 

I fired up Fiddler2 to confirm this and was interested to see traffic resolving to nike.112.2o7.net. This is a screenshot of Fiddler2 in action:

Launching a browser and opening the 2o7.net URL concludes the expedition as seen here:

So consider this a retraction AND an extra congratulations to the R/GA / Nike+ team for leading the RIA community by example. You all get an A+!

Footnote: Click here to learn more about Omniture’s 2o7.net domain.

---

Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 9, 2009

---

---

---

---