Unique page identifiers

Digital Data Exchange relies on page rules logic that is based on unique page identifiers found on your site pages. The unique page identifier is some value (for example, a JavaScript or HTML object that contains a string) that uniquely identifies every site page for which you want Digital Data Exchange to manage tags.

A unique page identifier needs to be on every page that you want to evaluate for page group rules. If Digital Data Exchange cannot find the unique page identifier on a page, no tag data is syndicated for that page, because no page group rules can be evaluated.

Optionally, if you require a certain level of granularity in your development, and have pages with different sets of tags and have rules that are applied to them at different stages of testing or production, you can use the unique page identifier to uniquely identify a page in a particular environment. A page that goes through various stages of development to production might have the same page ID, but the version of the page in production is not the same as the version of the page in development. If each of the page versions needs a unique set of tags and applied rules, you can distinguish them by using a different unique page identifier for each version.

By default, unique page identifiers in Digital Data Exchange are JavaScript objects. They can also be values based on a number of other methods, including cookie, HTML object, URL, local or session storage, or HTML <meta> tag. The values for the unique page identifiers can be the same as your page ID parameter values, but you must still explicitly specify what data object Digital Data Exchange uses for the unique page identifiers. If you already have an HTML object that is defined for Page IDs, you can use that same object as your unique page identifier method.

For Multisite clients, unique page identifiers can be inherited from the Multisite Global ID.

Use this procedure to define the format for your unique page id:

  1. Click Manage > Global Settings.
  2. Specify the type of object to be used for all unique page identifiers for your system.
  3. Define any properties that are required for the type of object you selected. For example, if you selected URLs as the format for your unique page identifiers, they do not require extra properties; but if you selected JavaScript, you must specify the object name that is used for unique page identifiers.
  4. Click Save to save your changes.

Examples

Here are examples you can use to define the unique page identifier for a page group with one page group rule that states Page Identifier equals product.
  • JavaScript Object - Using this method, page group rules look for the JavaScript Object that was provided in the Global Settings. For example, if you enter digitalData.pageInstanceID, you need to ensure that every page on the website has a JavaScript object similar to this, where dd-standardpages is the value of the unique page identifier:

    var digitalData = {pageInstanceID:"dd-standardpages"};

  • URL - Using this method, page group rules evaluate against the entire URL (not just URL parameters) to find a matching value for each rule condition. For example, if your product page URL is http://www.mysite.com/shop/product/dinnerware-4-piece-setting?ID=1234&CategoryID=5678, the page group rule finds a match (the URL contains the word "product") based on the page group rule Page Identifier equals product. Using "ends with" in your page group rule for a URL, might not always work, because your site might append parameters to the end of the URL.
  • HTML - Using this method allows you to specify either an HTML object or an attribute of an HTML object for the page group rule to evaluate against.
    • HTML object only - Page group rules find the HTML object with the specified ID and look at the inner HTML to retrieve the unique page identifier. For example:

      <p><div id="uniqueIdentifier">product<div></p>

    • HTML object & attribute - Page group rules find the HTML object with the specified ID and look for the specified attribute name to retrieve the unique page identifier. For example:

      <p><div id="uniqueId" uniquepageidentifier="product"></div></p>

Parent topic: Global settings