391347 - Enable per locale tracking of the download links

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: installTrackers()

The download links at mozilla.com point to (for example):
http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-2.0.0.6&os=win&lang=pl
which redirects to:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-2.0.0.6&os=win&lang=pl

However, in Urchin we only find the following record:
/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-2.0.0.6

There is no locale information so we can't actually break the statistics down into per locale download data. I'm not sure why Urchin doesn't register the download parameters that follow "product". It seems that it ignores the URL part which starts with the first "&", but I've seen on mozilla-europe.org that it can convert it into "%3D".

On mozilla-europe.org site we don't have the "thank you for downloading firefox" page (which is tracked by Urchin), so Pascal Chevrel and me, we wrote a little piece of JavaScript, which puts onclick events pointing to urchinTracker() function on each download link. This way, we are able to track clicks on these link, as they get registered as normal pages (e.g. /download-tracking/pl/firefox-2.0.0.6/osx).

I attach the script to this bug. Maybe we could use it on mozilla.com pages? 

Advantages:
- get per locale download statistics easily, with Urchin
- observe click paths for each locale
- measure the downloads from release notes pages
- measure the downloads from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

Comment 1

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

Comment on attachment 275761 [details]
installTrackers()

-		for (var i = 0; link = document.links[i]; i++) {
+		for (var i = 0; link = document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]; i++) {

or

+		for (var link in document.getElementsByTagName('a')) {

-			downloadLinks[i]['param' + parameterDetails[0].charAt(0).toUpperCase() + parameterDetails[0].substring(1)] = parameterDetails[1]

why this? downloadLinks[i].mozParams = Array();
downloadLinks[i].mozParams['name1'] etc. sounds cleaner cause you can easly iterate through it, am I wrong?

Comment 2

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

(In reply to comment #1)

I used this one:
for (var i = 0; link = document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]; i++)
as
for (var link in document.getElementsByTagName('a')) assigned indexes only.


> -                       downloadLinks[i]['param' +
> parameterDetails[0].charAt(0).toUpperCase() + parameterDetails[0].substring(1)]
> = parameterDetails[1]
> 
> why this? downloadLinks[i].mozParams = Array();
> downloadLinks[i].mozParams['name1'] etc. sounds cleaner cause you can easly
> iterate through it, am I wrong?

Sure, I was thinking about it but I thought it would be easier this way to get the value of a specific parameter. On mozilla.com the url is:
product=firefox-2.0.0.6&os=win&lang=pl
However on mozilla-europe.org it is:
lang=pl&product=firefox-2.0.0.6&os=win

I needed a simple solution to put all the prameters in this order:
'/download-tracking/' + lang + '/' + product + '/' + os

That's why I don't hold them in an array like this:
[ [lang, pl], [product, firefox-2.0.0.6], [os, win] ]
(which on mozilla.com would look like this:
[ [product, firefox-2.0.0.6], [os, win], [lang, pl] ])

Currently I create 3 properties for each download link. With your solution, I'd create 3 properties and an empty array. Is this OK?

Looks a lot cleaner though.

Comment 3

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: installTrackers() with changes proposed by Gandalf

Comment 4

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: Corrected script

Ooops, I forgot to remove some IE-debug code the last time.
In this version I also got rid of .length in the for loops, as Pascal suggested.

Comment 5

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Hey guys,

I was waiting to address this bug until the new download button changes were finished.  I pushed the changes to mozilla-europe last night (and will push mozilla.com this week).  If you look at the source of the pages, you'll see it's a significant change, but a lot simpler on the backend and will make pushing new products out easier.  If you adapt your script to the new code, I don't have a problem adding it.

pkim - any objections?

Comment 6

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

I've tried to make the script as portable as possible, and the only thing you change in it is the regexp of the download link. The function installTrackers() can put the trackers on any kind of links (I'm going to propose to use it in bug 393056 as well), and for the download links it takes the following form:

installTrackers("download.*?mozilla.org|download.html", urchinTracker);

The regexp matches the links pointing to download.mozilla.org, download2.mozilla.org etc., as well as the download.html file linked on http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html.

I'll update the script so that it additionally passes the UA info and attach it to this bug.

Comment 7

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: installTrackers() with browser detection

Here is the version of the script which adds '/using:$browser' at the end of the fake tracking URL. The URLs look like this one for example:
/download-tracking/fr/firefox-2.0.0.6/win/using:firefox2
(for a windows French firefox 2.0.0.6 build downloaded with Firefox 2.*.

This code can be inserted into the /js/util.js file, which is linked to on every mozilla.com page.

The purpose is twofold:
1. have the installTrackers() function available site-wide (useful for bug 393056),
2. put the urchinTracker function pointers (triggered with click events) on every download link throughout the site. 

See description of this bug to see why the 2nd objective is important. We could try to fix Urchin instead, but I'm not sure if it's worth the time, with the replacement on its way.

Comment 8

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Hmm, on second thought the code for bug 393056 will have to be a different one, and we won't probably use installTrackers() for anything else than download links. I guess it should be named installDownloadTrackers() then.

Comment 9

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: installDownloadTrackers() with browser detection

installTrackers() changed to installDownloadTrackers()

Comment 10

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: installDownloadTrackers() with browser detection

Small changes to make the script similar in structure to the one in attachment 277878 [details] in bug 393056.

Comment 11

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Comment on attachment 277879 [details]
installDownloadTrackers() with browser detection

An awful typo:
   ){};
Sorry :(

Comment 12

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: installTrackers() without an ugly typo

Now, it should be OK.

Wil, r?

Comment 13

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Comment on attachment 278094 [details]
installTrackers() without an ugly typo

Removing review request from this bug. See bug 392342 for further discussion.

Comment 14

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

The bug has been fixed with the resolution of the bug 392342.