The Manual Link Click tag is used when the automated collection of link click data does not occur and LIVEview or Site Promotions/Real Estate reporting is desired for the affected links.

Digital Analytics testing tools, including Tag Bar/Tag Monitor and Implementation Test Tool (ITT) can assist in determining if automatic Link Click tags are generated for the links in question.

Automatic Link Click tag collection and the associated LIVEview plugin reporting is supported only for HTML anchor links meeting the following requirements:

• HTML anchor contains a valid non-null href= attribute.
• HTML anchor is defined in the HTML prior to the completion of page load.
• For example: <a href="/path/doc.html">link</a>.

Common scenarios requiring Manual Link Click tags

• HTML Anchor tags without HREF= attributes or otherwise use JavaScript to create navigation at the time of click.
• Clicks on Java, Silverlight, or other interactive application elements without HTML anchors.
• HTML Anchor tags in iframes that do not include the Digital Analytics library script blocks and a Page View tag. In these cases, a Link Click will either not be collected or will be collected without the required Page ID parameter and rejected from reporting.

Link Name (nm) Parameter

The Link Name (nm) parameter of the Link Click tag can be collected in addition to the anchor href= relative value. This value determines the unique Link Click data row in combination with the collected Page ID (pi) and Target/HREF URL (hr) values. When the Link Click tag is generated automatically by the eluminate.js tag library, the 'Link Name' tag parameter value is populated if one of the following attributes is defined in the HTML anchor: name=, title=, or id=. If more than one attribute is defined in an HTML anchor, the following rules determine which attribute value is collected in the Link Name (nm) parameter:

• A defined name= attribute is used if defined anywhere in the anchor.
• A defined title= attribute is used if name= is not defined.
• A defined id= attribute is used only if name= or title= are not defined anywhere in the anchor.

If no id=, title= or name= attribute is defined in the anchor, the Link Name (nm) value is not collected. In this case only Page ID (pi) and Target/HREF URL (hr) parameters are collected.

The LIVEview browser plug-in for Link Click graphical overlay data reporting ('annotation') attempts to match collected Link Click data rows to the correct anchor in the current page HTML based on the originally collected Page ID (pi), Target/HREF URL (hr), and Link Name (nm) value (if any). If any of these values have changed, if new name=, title=, or id= attributes were introduced, or if the original anchor no longer exists in the current page HTML, then the LIVEview plug-in might not be able to display the original data in the live page annotation. The originally collected Link Click data for changed or missing anchors are available in the LIVEview data download for that period (CSV and MS Excel file format options).

Key Reports Populated

LIVEview, Content (Page Categories: Context Menu / Summary Zoom/download icon: "Download All LIVEview Data")

Tagging function

In order to use the Manual Link Click tag, a call is made to cmCreateManualLinkClickTag(…) function with the appropriate parameters.

Note: The following values are automatically removed from Acoustic Digital Analytics tag parameter data and cannot be collected or reported:

• Single quote (')
• Double quote (")
• Carriage return (hex 0D; regular expression \r)
• Line feed (hex 0A; regular expression \n)
• Comma (,): replaced with a space character prior to data loading and reporting
• Backslash (\): this is a standard JavaScript escape character. In order to collect and report a "\" character, two "\" must be specified in sequence ("\\"). The 2nd "\"is reported.

Tags

• Href (Required): Value that uniquely identifies the object clicked. For standard anchors this is the link HREF= attribute value. For other objects, a different value might be used.

  If the link click is implemented for purposes of Site Promotion or Real Estate reporting, a valid relative or absolute URL must be specified including cm_sp= and/or cm_re= link parameter values. Length: 256.

• Link Name (Optional): Determines the uniqueness of the link/object in combination with Href and Page ID. This optional value also appears in column 2 of the LIVEview Content download. Length: 256.
• Page ID (Optional): Only needed if it is necessary to force association of the 'click' Href with a correct Page ID value in cases where multiple, or no, Page View tags have been sent from the page prior to the click event. Length: 256.