727988 - Thank you page loading after Beta download resulting in inaccurate Webtrends reporting

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(www.mozilla.org :: Analytics, defect)

Description

[Bradley Gross]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.1
Build ID: 20120208060813

Steps to reproduce:

I noticed that after a user clicks the download button on the Beta download page (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta/) they are taken to the standard Thank You page.  The Thank You page was originally tagged to count downloads of the production version of Firefox. Now it will trigger a hit to our data servers in both cases (downloads of either Beta or the production version).  This will result in artificially inflated values for the number of production version downloads in various Webtrends reports (due to the inclusion of Beta downloads).

The easiest solution here is not to load the Thank You page after a Beta download is triggered; however the download dialog box seems to be linked to the Thank You page.  Is it possible to associate the download dialog to the Beta download page instead? The other option is to configure the Thank you page so that it sends data accurately reflecting the product which is downloaded.  

Historically we have collected data for Beta and Aurora downloads in a slightly different fashion than we do for the production version.  For Beta and Aurora we count clicks on the download button, for the production version we count loads of the Thank You page.  

So as mentioned above, additional coding may be necessary in order for Beta downloads not to muddy the Webtrends reporting for the production version.  One option would be to load the Thank You page normally when the production version is downloaded.  And in the case where Beta is downloaded, load the Thank You page but dynamically configure it to not send any data to Webtrends (that data would have already been received when the user clicked the button to download Beta).

Comment 1

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Mozilla is no longer using Webtrends.