Why Self-Host?
As web browsers continue to implement additional privacy measures and ad blockers, self-hosting provides the best shot at maximum track-ability of your visitors. Self hosting allows all site on your site to be hosted on your site.
CaliberMind uses a first party cookie originating from <yourcompany>.com, this article will help you host our JavaScript Analytics Library on <yourcompany>.com to help maximize your tracking footprint.
Benefits of Self-Hosting
The Main benefits of self-hosting the file (client-hosted CDN) are:
- Better data collection rates; self-hosting = 1st party tag loading, which prevents ad-blockers from disrupting the client's data collection.
- Better tag performance and faster tag loading.
- Ability to control updates to the file for security review.
- MetaRouter's identity syncing function (Sync Injector) loads IDs into a 1st-party cookie.
Requirements to Self-Host
- A branded Content Delivery Network (CDN), such as
cdn.<yourcompany>.com - A process and IT administrator to refresh the JavaScript file once at least every 2 months.
- How to retrieve your API Write Key
- As a CaliberMind admin access the Web Tracker page via your Organization's settings. https://my.calibermind.com/settings/tracking
- In the code snippet provided, locate your Analytics write key. The key can can be found in your snippet in this code block:
analytics.load("XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX")
(see example below)
- Accessing and downloading Page JavaScript file
- Each generated Analytics.js file can be found on Metarouter's CDN with the following convention:
https://cdn.metarouter.io/a/v1/<metarouter key>.js, where<WRITE_KEY>is the pipeline id/write key described as the source within you CaliberMind header snippet. - Download this file and upload it to the secondary location of your choice.
- Each generated Analytics.js file can be found on Metarouter's CDN with the following convention:
- Update the JavaScript SDK header & footer snippet with the new domain
Manually modify the larger snippet, described above in Step 1. documentation, to replace this string cdn.metarouter.io/a/v1/ with the correct location pointing to the file. Expect the file to still have its original name.
- That step should be performed quarterly (at a minimum) to ensure the file that has any security updates MetaRouter may push.
In the <head> on your site, make sure every page is updated with the new code block.
OPTIONAL STEP
If you are using CaliberMind's "Auto-Identify" script in your site's <footer> such as the below, you'll also want to host this file and re-point your code to your CDN file:
<script
type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.calibermind.com/js/identifyEmail.latest.js"></script>
Limitations
- Self-hosted files do not automatically receive updates or bug fixes when deployed.
- CaliberMind and Metarouter are no longer are responsible for page-load times of the Analytics.js hosted on your CDN.