W3C | Submissions

Team Comment on the "Customer Experience Digital Data Acquisition 1.0" Submission

W3C is pleased to receive the Customer Experience Digital Data Acquisition 1.0 Submission, Member Submission Request from IBM Corporation.

Summary

Web pages are frequently instrumented with JavaScript code that provides analytics data to third parties. In the language of the submission, "Digital Analytics is the collection and analysis of various metrics from multiple digital touchpoints to provide goal oriented, actionable understanding and response to user behaviors."

The Submission proposes to define a JavaScript object that would hold various metadata about an interaction (including both page metadata and data describing a business process implemented on a Web site), ranging from page name to information about registered users and business-process-related events. A standardized JavaScript object could be shared among several pieces of JavaScript code from different sources, and could help to significantly reduce complexity and load time of analytics solutions.

The specification further defines a mapping of these data elements to shortcuts that can be used to transfer analytics data to a service provider through an HTTP GET request, called the "Customer Experience Digital Data Communication Specification."

Next Steps

This specification comes at a time when analytics and user tracking are at the forefront of interest. We concur with the submitters that it will be useful to further review and refine this specification in, initially, a Community Group. Additionally, the Team is working on a proposal for a series of Digital Marketing workshops as a result of the 2012 headlights process and expects to take up conversations about "customer experience" on that occasion.

Specific issues that we recommend to address in such a discussion include:

Please send comments to the public-new-work@w3.org mailing list (archive).


Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> and Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org>