Setting up Volument

The embed code

To install Volument, paste the following code on your HTML pages:

<!-- Analytics by volument.com  -->
<script async src="https://cdn.volument.com/v1/volument.js"
  onload="volument(your_token)"></script>

Imporant: Replace “your_token” with the actual token that you can get from your account.

After the code is in place, Volument starts measuring how your visitors engage with the site.

Tracking conversions

Volument collects engagement and retention data automatically without any configurations. However, all the key conversion events, like registrations and purchases, must be wired programmatically. This happens by calling the following methods on the right spot on your code:

volument.convertToLead()

Call this method when the visitor becomes a “lead.“ That is: they hand their email or phone number so you have a way to reach them.

volument.convertToCustomer()

Call this method when the visitor and converts to a customer by handing their payment information such as the credit card and no money is paid at the spot.

volument.pay(amount)

Call this method when the visitor hands their payment information and pays the given amount of money in the currency of your choice. The visitor is converted to a customer so no additional convertToCustomer call is needed.

volument.invite(peers)

Call this method when the visitor invites her friends or other associates to your product contributing to the viral growth. The visitor is converted to a “promoter”. The peers argument is the amount of people the promoter invited. Default is one peer.

Areas and topics

Volument extracts area and page information from your URLs. For example, in /blog/introducing-volument the area is “blog” and the topic is “introducing-volument”. Volument is quite good at guessing these, but you should configure Volument to understand your exact website structure:

Custom areas

areas configuration option specifies the areas on your website that you want to have a separate analysis. For example

<script src="https://cdn.volument.com/v1/volument.js"></script>

<script>
volument({
  areas: ['blog', 'docs', 'partners'],
  token: your_token,
})
</script>

Pathname parser

parser option specifies a custom parser to extract areas and topics from your path names. Here's an example parser that would work nicely for Twitter.

<script>
function twitterParser(path) {
  var main_areas = 'home explore notifications messages bookmarks'.split(' '),
    parts = path.split('/').slice(1)

  if (main_areas.includes(parts[0])) return { area: 'main', topic: parts[0] }
  return { area: parts[1] == 'status' ? 'status' : 'profile' }
}

volument({ token: your_token, parser: twitterParser })
</script>

Campaign configuration

Once you have created a campaign on the user interface you can either provide the campaign indicator on the query string or you can provide it with a campaign configuration option. For example:

<script>
volument({ token: '0049dc251', campaign: 'c1' })
</script>

By handing the campaign information on the client configuration you can keep the query string clean. Some developers are known to avoid links that contain tracking indicators.

Single-page applications

If your site is a single-page application (SPA) and routing is built around pushState (PJAX, Turbolinks, or similar) you can use volument.route() to emulate page switches, for example:

// turbolinks example
document.addEventListener('turbolinks:load', function() {
  volument.route()
})

route([path])

Call this method when the visitor is routed to a new page. After this Volument starts tracking how the new page is consumed. The path argument is optional and location.pathname is used by default.

This website is actually a SPA, because we want to provide faster page loads for our visitors.

Cookie consent

We offer a specialized initialization method, volument.consent(), to abstract all the complexities in the cookie consent dialogs. Please use the full version of the client volument-full.js (7.4K) in place of the default version volument.js (5.6K) as follows:

<!-- Analytics by volument.com  -->
<script async src="https://cdn.volument.com/v1/volument-full.js"></script>

<script>
  volument.consent({ region: 'Europe', country: 'FI', token: your_token })
</script>

Consent configuration

Detecting visitor's country

To show the banner to European visitors only, we must have away to detect where the visitor is coming from. One good way is to use a geo-location service. There are a lot of good services available and many of them are free up to a certain limit. We use ipgeolocation.io as follows:

// a geo-location function
function geolocate(fn) {

  // return cached info
  var loc = localStorage.location
  if (loc) { loc = loc.split('/'); return fn(loc[0], loc[1]) }

  // use a location service
  $.get('https://api.ipgeolocation.io/ipgeo', { apiKey: 'your_key' }, function(loc) {
    var country = loc.country_code2,
      region = loc.continent_name

    // save to cache for later requests
    localStorage.location = country + '/' + region
    fn(country, region)
  })

}

geolocate(function(country, region) {

  // start tracking, request consent if needed
  volument.consent({
    token: '<our_token>',
    country: country,
    region: region,

  }, function(was_ok, reason) {
    // a callback function for custom stuff

  })

})