JavaScript API - Terms and Definitions
Before moving forward on the specifics of the API implementation, you should familiarize
yourself with a few terms and concepts:
Activity
Activity is any kind of user or server activity in your site that you would like
to track and measure. Examples are: posting of new content, commenting, page views,
video views, purchasing, etc.
Visitor
A visitor is a user that browses your site. NuConomy allows you to track visitors
in two ways:
- First party cookies. This is done automatically; you do
not need to do anything to make it happen.
- User IDs from your database. Our API allows you to tell
us the specific ID used in your own database to identify each user. This allows
you to see those same user IDs on many of the reports in the system. It also allows
you to correlate the user level reports to your back-end and marketing systems.
For example, this allows you to embed a list of the top bloggers in your community
or to send specific emails to different users based on their site behavior.
It is important to note that you will always get just one, comprehensive view of
every user on your site. Example use cases are as follows:
- If a user browsed your site for a month, and just recently decided to register on
the site, NuConomy will automatically combine all previous user activity history
into just one view.
- If a user has previously registered to your site and simply did not log in for a
few visits (i.e. was an ‘anonymous’ user), NuConomy will automatically combine all
previous user activity into just one view.
- If a user (or a user’s anti-virus program, e.g. McAfee) deletes cookies and a user
has not logged into your site in awhile, NuConomy cookies the user as if the user
were anonymous. Then, once the user logs into any site within NuConomy’s ecosystem,
NuConomy automatically re-cookies the user with the previously anonymous cookies.
This allows marketers to truly look at the lifetime behavior – and, hence, lifetime
value – of each user. We call this the NuConomy sticky cookie.
Content Owner
A content owner is the person or entity that is responsible for a specific piece
of content on your site. Examples are as follows:
- The author of a blog post
- The user that uploaded a video to your site
- The reporter in your newspaper
- The company that created a product in your store
The ability to specify and track the owner of a piece of content is unique to NuConomy
and drives the concept of contribution. For example, the contribution of a user
to a UGC video site (e.g. YouTube) is not just the number of ads the user clicked
on or the number of videos watched; rather, contribution is those actions combined
with the actions other users have performed on the videos that the user uploaded
to the site. A specific user can consume content (e.g. click on ads around content
uploaded by other users, watch videos uploaded by other users). That same user may
also contribute content (e.g. upload videos of their own). Other users may now perform
activities on the user uploaded video. All of these activities that take place in
this growing ecosystem define the contribution of this user to your business.
Content ID
Content ID is a unique string that identifies a piece of content on your site (e.g.
video, product ID, permalink for a blog post).
NuConomy Studio was built with the goal of going beyond the old page view model
of measuring site performance and instead measures different activities across different
pieces of content that appear on the same page. For example, a single webpage might
have the following content:
- Video – NuConomy measures the various activities that occur in a video player (e.g.
stop, fast forward, rewind, pause, play different video, etc.)
- Product listings – NuConomy measures all the interactions on each product such as
mouse hover, check price, etc.
- Articles/blog posts – NuConomy measures the different interactions on each blog
post, such as comments, ratings, shares, etc.
Because the system is flexible and easy to use, you can also choose a combination
and concurrently measure some things on the video, article and page level. You can
easily slice the reports later to isolate specific activities (e.g. comments, ratings)
or content pieces (e.g. videos, articles).
