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Advanced Website Personalization with inSite’s JavaScript action

Russ Jeffery • Jan 27, 2015

A few months back, Duda released a new inSite action called JavaScript. This allows you to embed some custom JavaScript into your website when a certain set of visitor conditions is met. What exactly does this mean? First let’s review the terminology and then we’ll go into some great examples of use cases for this powerful advanced feature.

inSites are based on triggers and actions , which is to say that a specific set of conditions need to be met (trigger) in order to cause something to be changed/displayed on your website (action). With the new addition of a JavaScript action, you can embed custom JavaScript code into the page when these conditions are met. JavaScript is the programing language of the web; it is what allows you to manipulate a page once it has been loaded in the browser.

Since the JavaScript action can be combined with any combination of inSite triggers, there are an unlimited number of potential options to choose from. Here are three great ones you could implement (with code included):

Changing the logo of your site for a limited amount of time

Google is famous for changing their logo for a day to celebrate someone or something special. With inSite, you can create a similar effect on your website as well. Let’s say you want to change your primary website logo to a custom Valentine’s Day logo you created.

The first step is creating a new inSite and selecting “Build your own.” The only trigger we will need to choose is the time trigger and then set the dates for the second week of February (for example, Feb. 9 – 14). After setting the date, you will want to make sure you select the JavaScript action.

Next you will see a box to insert your own custom code that will be triggered on the week before Valentine’s Day. In this box, enter the following code. Make sure you fill in the URL of your custom image in place of my example URL.

$(‘#dm-logo-image’).attr(‘src’,’http://example.com/image.jpg’);

If done correctly, it should look something like this:

The final steps are to preview the inSite (to make sure it works correctly), save the inSite and publish the site. Come Feb. 9, your visitors will see your Valentine’s Day logo!

Change the phone numbers for an advertising campaign

Many professionals and web agencies run search engine advertising campaigns (SEM) for their clients and one of the key items to track is phone calls coming from a specific campaign. To do this, many agencies will place a different phone number on the website and record the calls that the advertising brings in separate from the primary business phone number.

Without inSite, setting up this kind website personalization could be very labor intensive. For example, you might have to create a whole new page just to change the phone numbers, or install scripts throughout the page to change the phone number every time it appears on the page. Let’s see how Duda and inSite make this easier while setting up an inSite for an advertising campaign to get more appointments at a local dentist.

To get started, create a new “Build your own” inSite. For this example, we will be using the Campaign URL trigger. In the URL parameters we will use type=dentist. This way when visitors come to the site with type=dentist in the URL, the phone number will be changed.

Next we will chose the JavaScript action and write our code to replace all phone numbers on the page with our SEM specific phone number to record campaign activity.

Duda provides a handy function that you can use to replace all phone numbers on a page automatically. Here’s the code:

dmAPI.replacePhoneNumber(‘555-555-5555′,’415-432-5512’);

(To use this, replace the 555-555-5555 with the existing phone number on the page and then replace the 415-432-5512 number with the campaign tracking phone number you want to use.)

Go ahead and move to the next step and save the inSite.

Now, when setting up the advertising campaign for your website, you will direct the search engine traffic to: www.example.com?type=dentist and all visitors to this page will only see the campaign specific phone number!

Display a YouTube video pop-up to first-time visitors

In our final example, we are going to get advanced and have a pop-up YouTube video displayed in the browser to visitors who come to the site for the first time. To do the heavy lifting of this, we are going to use a simple open source jQuery plugin called popup.js by toddish.co.uk.

The first step will be to create our inSite, as in other examples we will use the “Build your own” option. The trigger we will use is number of visits and we will select the option to display this inSite for first-time visitors.

Next, we will choose our JavaScript action and embed the code below. The code will load some custom CSS to style the pop-up and then some JavaScript to dynamically open the YouTube video embed. You’ll see there is a popup.open call in the code that defines the YouTube video embed URL. Change this to the video you want to embed.

//load pop-up css async

$(‘head’).append( $(‘<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />’).attr(‘href’,’https://dm-util.s3.amazonaws.com/support_portal/scripts/popup.css’));

$.getScript(‘https://dm-util.s3.amazonaws.com/support_portal/scripts/jquery.popup.min.js’).done(function(){

//load pop-up settings

var popup=new $.Popup({types:{youtube:function(content,callback){content='<iframewidth=”420″height=”315″src=”‘+content+'”frameborder=”0″allowfullscreen></iframe>’;callback.call(this,content);}},width:420,height:315});

//load pop-up, change the youtube embed URL to embed a different video

popup.open(‘https://www.youtube.com/embed/utUPth77L_o’);

}).fail(function(){

//if getting script fails, place simple console message

console.log(‘popup error getting script’);

});

After placing the code in JavaScript box, hit the preview inSite button. If done correctly, your window should look something like this:

As you can see, there is plenty of potential for the JavaScript inSite and there are plenty more examples to run through. Can you think of any other great examples? If you have an idea, post it in the comments and I’ll update the article with more examples!

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