Whitepaper on Silverlight and Web Analytics
As many of you may know, I have been working to understand how Silverlight applications can best integrate with Web Analytics services. Web analytics is the field of understanding and quantifying how people interact with web sites in order to align the site's design with business goals. One of the challenges of Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs) today is equating the traditional measure of web usage, the page view, with the way people interact with RIA applications that exist on a single page. Interestingly, most of the major players in web analytics today use JavaScript page tags to track usage and engagement on web sites. Since Silverlight's programming model is also JavaScript, these systems can work very well together to track RIA interaction. You can then start to track the usage of your Silverlight RIA with your existing web analytics service. Once you are tracking usage, you can start to see some very interesting applications with Silverlight-integrated web analytics: because of Silverlight's separation of design (in XAML) and client code (in JavaScript) it's easy to try different designs with A/B testing to see if new design ideas get the business results they were aiming for.
Today (10/16/2007 - 11:00 AM PDT) I will be presenting my findings in a webinar with two partners, Omniture and WebTrends, and in a whitepaper co-authored with Clayton Moore of WebTrends.
Register for the free webinar: https://www112.livemeeting.com/lrs/microsoft1/Registration.aspx?pageName=x128cqqmmz47ndcf
You can download the whitepaper in various formats from a demo site at https://xmldocs.net/Analytics/. The source code for the site, a simple HTML page with a Silverlight application. is also available on the site as well.
The whitepaper is at (same document, different formats):
- XPS: https://xmldocs.net/Analytics/Using Web Analytics with Microsoft Silverlight.xps
- PDF: https://xmldocs.net/Analytics/Using Web Analytics with Microsoft Silverlight.pdf
- XAML: https://xmldocs.net/Analytics/Using Web Analytics with Microsoft Silverlight.xaml (I will do a webinar in November on how I created this one from a Word 2007 Add-in by transforming the Open XML to a XAML FlowDocument)
If you want to learn more about Web Analytics, go to Eric Peterson's site Web Analytics Demystified and read his book of the same name. He got me hooked on the subject when I went to a panel discussion on Web Analytics in March.
I would love your feedback on these whitepapers as I see them as living documents.