Technical FAQ
1. How does Meteor work?
Meteor Tracker is a Javascript-based tracking technology that anonymously identifies individual visitors to your site and tracks the additional visitors and conversions they generate through sharing. It works as follows:
- Meteor assigns a unique ID to each individual visitor that hits the site.
- Meteor places the user's ID in a cookie and appends the ID value to the end of their page URL.
- If the user copies and pastes that URL into an email message and forwards it on to a friend, for example, as soon as that friend clicks on the link and arrives at the site, Meteor captures all referral information including the sharer’s unique ID from the URL and replaces it with a new unique ID.
This process then repeats itself each time the URL gets shared. In the background, Meteor stores the referral information for each new visitor, building a sharing graph that connects him/her to the user that shared the content as well as to any users with which he/she shared content that drove additional visitors to the site.
2. How can Meteor impact my site?
Meteor can impact your site in a few different ways.
Browser Back Button
On the web today, many AJAX (asynchronous javascript & XML) applications cause problems with the browser's back buttons. In Meteor's case, that's because the act of appending our tracking ID to the URL is an action that is added to the browser's history. As a result, when a user clicks their browser's back button, they are taken back to the previous item in their history, which is the same page without the appeneded tracking ID. This makes it difficult for the user to navigate backwards using the back button.
Solution:
This issue is fairly common amongst AJAX applications, and often doesn't impact user experience. If your site does require the user to have a reliable back button, then we suggest implementing Really Simple History on your site. Please note that this is third party code which we do not hold any responsibility for.
Impact on SEO
Depending on how Meteor Tracker is implemented on your site, it can result in generating links that point to duplicate content from the perspective of search engine crawlers.
Solution:
The solution to this problem is to include a Canonical Link Tag between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags on the page(s) being tracked by Meteor. This tag essentially acts like a 301 redirect for the search engine crawlers and as a consequence addresses the duplicate content issue. This method is fully supported by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask search engines.
The basic formatting of this tag as as follows:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoursite.com/pagename" />
Where href is the URL path of the page, not including Meteor's hash or query string parameter. This will tell search engines to ignore the Meteor tracking ID when indexing your site. You'll need to add this to each page where Meteor is installed. If you have a site template or include file, it should be easy to add this tag to use a variable for the current page as it's href.
For more information on the formatting of this tag, please see Google's own description.
Impact on Other Analytics
If you have another analytics solution deployed on your site, Please see this help article.
3. Should I use Meteor's Hash or Query String option?
The default option for Meteor is to use the query string and trigger a quick, immediate page reload. However, there are a number of reasons why you might want to use the URL hash instead. Below is a table showing the pros and cons of both methods.
| Consideration | Hash | Query String |
|---|---|---|
| Triggers page reload? | No | Yes |
| Tracking code must be placed in HTML header? | No | Yes |
| Breaks if site's query string is used for other purposes? | No | No |
| Breaks if site's URL hash is used for other purposes? | Yes | No |
| Interferes with other web analytics? | No | Potentially |
The hash option is a better choice if you can't place Meteor in your site's HTML header for some reason, or if you need to avoid the page reload. Before installing Meteor with the hash option, please make sure you are not using the hash anywhere else on your site ("back to top" links, etc.). If a conflict in the hash occurs, Meteor will not function.