Parent Tag Channel Messaging for Cross-Frame User Activity Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional techniques fail to accurately record user activity in webpages that comprise elements like inline frames (iframes) or WebViews, leading to incomplete and useless analytics, as they cannot interact directly with child pages, resulting in missed insights into user behavior.
Innovation Solution
Establishing communication channels between parent and child tags within a webpage to efficiently record user activity, ensuring personal identifying information is kept private, by using unique identifiers and message ports to capture and transmit activity data from child pages to the parent tag, which then sends it to a server for session replay generation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If conventional techniques are used to record user activity, then implementation is simple, but user activity in child pages cannot be captured leading to incomplete analytics
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces message ports as intermediary communication channels between parent and child pages. These message ports enable the parent page to receive activity data from child pages without direct interaction, resolving the technical barrier while maintaining system modularity. The intermediary mechanism allows precise activity tracking across page boundaries without requiring complex direct integration.
2Loss of information
If communication channels are established between parent and child pages, then complete user activity data can be captured, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the analytics system into independent parent and child page components, each with its own activity recording capabilities. By dividing the system into modular units that communicate through standardized message ports, the solution achieves complete data collection while maintaining manageable complexity through clear separation of concerns and independent component design.
3Reliability
If activity data is captured from child pages, then analytics completeness improves, but implementation difficulty increases due to cross-page interaction barriers
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements universal message port interfaces that can handle multiple types of user activity events (clicks, scrolls, form submissions, etc.) through a standardized communication protocol. This multi-functional approach allows the same communication infrastructure to reliably capture diverse activity types across different child pages, improving analytics reliability while simplifying implementation through interface standardization.
Data Source
AI summary
A parent tag in a parent webpage displayed on a computing device sends a unique identifier to a child tag for each child page within the parent webpage and receives a response from a first child page. The parent tag generates a channel message comprising the unique identifier for the first child page and a recording status and sends the channel message to the first child page. The parent tag receives a content message from the first child page comprising activity data captured according to the recording status and comprising one or more actions performed by a user in the first child page. The parent tag sends the activity data comprising one or more actions performed by the user in the webpage and activity data comprising one or more actions performed by the user in the first child page to a server system to generate a session replay.