Controlling Digital Experience Analytics Data Collection (DXA)

Last Updated March 20, 2023

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Brief Overview

Controlling Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) (previously known as UBT) data collection is an important part of understanding User Experience in Insights. Using this feature, you can now control the collection of Digital Experience Analytics by informing WalkMe whether it is allowed to collect data or not.

Use Cases

Sensitive pages
If you have a sensitive page in your app that can contain PII, for example, a "Billing Info" form, or "Personal Profile". Instead of blocklisting all elements in this page using element censorship, you can set isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled in this page to False, and DXA events will not be collected from this page.

Allowlisting areas for Collection 
If you are not interested in auto-tracking or sending all engagements from your site to WalkMe, you can set UBT collection to manual mode (see how below) and set isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled to True only in the places in the site in which you wish WalkMe to collect Digital Experience Analytics event interactions. For example, in pages that are not sensitive or have high business value for feature adoption.

Sensitive Accounts
If you are a SaaS customer of WalkMe with the need for the collection of DXA only for some of your customers (accounts). For example, a Service provider might want to collect DXA only for their beta customers or customers outside of the European Union. In this case, we suggest you set isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled to True if the end-user is from an account you wish to collect DXA from.

How It Works

Steps for defining DXA default behavior and preventing collection:
Once Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) is turned on, the auto-collection of site-interaction events (clicks, input changes, etc..) starts immediately.

To prevent collection on specific pages, or in specific cases, simply define a function called "isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled" on the global window object, and our collection tool will query it before sending Digital Experience Analytics events to WalkMe.

The only valid return values of this function are of type boolean (true/false), other values will be ignored and the default behavior will be saved.

If isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled returns True, User Behavior events will be collected and sent to WalkMe.

If isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled returns False, User Behavior events will not be collected and will not be sent to WalkMe.

If isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled is undefined or returns an invalid value, the default behavior will be used.

The default behavior is to collect. To change the default behavior to only collect if isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled is defined and returns True, you must turn ON User Behavior Manual Collection Mode.

To turn ON User Behavior Manual Collection Mode, please follow these steps:

1. Log into your account at insights.walkme.com.
2. Go to the environment of your choice and click on Environment Settings.
3. In the Collection Enablement tab you will see the following screen:
4. Click on the Toggle next to: "Start Digital Experience Analytics data collection manually"
5. To turn it ON:
6. Click on Save Settings and perform a Publish action in the WalkMe Editor in order for the new settings to take effect.

Once turned ON, Digital Experience Analytics events will only be collected if isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled is defined and returns True. If the function is not defined or returns an invalid value, Digital Experience Analytics events will not be collected. WalkMe Engagement events (engagement with WM deployables) will still be collected.

Code Example to Prevent Collection
The following code will define the function to return False and will prevent collection:

window.isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled = function() {
return false;
}

Testing and Troubleshooting

Digital Experience Analytics events are sent to WalkMe in requests named 'tell'.

Once the "Start Digital Experience Analytics collection" toggle is turned ON and Publish was performed, tell events (viewed using Developers Tool) should not be sent, unless isWalkmeUserBehaviorDataCollectionEnabled is defined and returns True.