Limitations on Data Collection with Web Events

Site Design

If your site design uses a modified implementation of event propagation, data collection might be affected.

If the normal event propagation is modified in any way, the event listener that is registered by the SAS tag might not be called. In situations where you use short-circuit logic to handle an event by returning "false" to a conditional test, data collection might not be aware that the event took place. This situation applies primarily to click events and form submit events.

For more information about site design, see Preparing Your Site in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Administration Guide.

Web Browser Settings

These browser settings can limit what data is collected:

• The combination of a user’s Do Not Track (DNT) settings in their browser and the administration settings. By default, the DNT header is ignored. To view these settings, navigate to AdministrationTasks. Click Personally Identifiable Data in Digital. Review the settings in Personally Identifiable Information in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Administration Guide.

• You set the _SI_DNT cookie in your users' browsers to disable tracking. For more information, see Using a Cookie to Opt Out from Tracking in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Administration Guide.

Domain Settings in SAS Customer Intelligence 360

To view the domain settings, navigate to AdministrationTasks. Click Domains in Digital. Take note of these settings:

• Make sure that your site domain is active.
• Review the data exclusion rules. Even when a site is active, data exclusion rules can prevent some data collection.

For more information, see Domains in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Administration Guide.

Event Restrictions and Guidelines

These rules and restrictions apply to event types:

• All events
  • The number of events that is collected for each session is limited to a maximum of 2,000.
  • For any attributes that are collected, the value is truncated to 1,000 characters. This applies to form field values, cookie values, JavaScript variables, page elements, and so on.
  • Event names must be unique across all event types, including across subfolders. In addition, events cannot have the same name as rules in global settings (such as Traffic Sources or Page URLs).
• The attributes that you create cannot have the same name as standard attributes in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. You cannot use the reserved names with a different case because the check is not case sensitive. For example, detail_id is a reserved name. You cannot use detail_ID or DETAIL_ID as attribute names, but you can use my_detail_id or detail_id1.

  For more information, see a list of reserved attribute names.

• Click events
  • These are the valid targets for click events:
    • anchors (<a>), buttons, and input elements.
    • <div> elements that have onclick handlers inlined in the HTML code.
    • elements that are marked as buttons by frameworks such as React, Angular, and so on.
    • elements that have the data-ci360-click attribute. This attribute explicitly enables any element for click tracking.
  • Click events are collected only when the events are not interrupted by another JavaScript event or otherwise blocked by unconventional site design.
  • Clicks events are not collected when the HREF attribute starts with javascript:.
  • Make sure that links do not contain personally identifiable information (PII).

    The data in link URLs is stored in the database tables and is used to populate reports. Do not include any data or text in links that should not be stored in the data tables.

• Content change events. For each page load, the number of content change events is limited to 10. Contact a SAS representative if you want to change this value.
• Forms
  • Form data can be collected only when it is part of a <form> element.
  • Forms must have a name attribute or an ID attribute. However, you can complete these steps if a form does not have these attributes:
    1. Configure the Form: name or Form: id field to use the Regular expression option.
    2. Set the value for the regular expression to .*.
       Note: This regular expression matches all forms by default, so you should limit the form definition’s scope by defining additional page rules and attribute rules.

  • Review the settings on the Event Tracking in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Administration Guide page. By default, form settings are disabled to prevent the SAS tag from inadvertently collecting sensitive data. To view this page, navigate to AdministrationTasks. Then select Event Tracking in Digital.

  • Review the settings on the Form Fields in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Administration Guide page. By default, data collection is enabled only for forms and fields that are explicitly defined. To view this page, navigate to AdministrationTasks. Then select Form Fields in Digital.

    The Form Fields To Collect section contains the site-wide inclusion rules and exclusion rules. By default, data collection is enabled only for forms and fields that are explicitly defined. In addition, review the settings in the Obscured Form Fields section. These settings specify when to obfuscate values from form fields.

• Identity events. For any events that collect identity values, the value must meet these criteria:
  • the value cannot be empty
  • the value must be less than 128 characters
  • the value cannot contain the following characters: |, "
• JavaScript variable changes
  • To collect event data from JavaScript variable changes, the variable needs to be part of a JavaScript object. For example, the dataLayer.variablename is a variable in the dataLayer object. The SAS tag cannot collect changes to global variables.
  • For each page load, the number of JavaScript variable changes is limited to 10. Contact a SAS representative if you want to change this value.
• Media events. For each page load, the number of media events is limited to 200.