Replay rule that stops RTV from trying to contact Omniture servers (or other third-party servers)

 

Here’s a tip – if a page is taking a long time to load, it may be trying to contact a 3rd-party tracking site like Omniture. Look at the “view page load detail”s when the replay view of a page seems to hang. You may see calls to 2o7.net, or other domains that are not part of your domain. These calls are RTV replaying embedded web-bugs – typically 1-pixel transparent gifs that are used to track visitors. Very often, I’ve seen RTV sit and wait a long time for a response – but because RTV is running on your desktop behind your corporate internet access rules, the company network disallows calls to those domains. So RTV just sits there waiting for it’s time-out to expire.

You can avoid this long wait, simply right-click the offending URL in the “view page load details”, and select “Don’t allow RTV to visit this URL…”  When the dialog box pops up, you should use wild cards to replace everything to the right of the domain. [example]. You can also replace part of the host name with a wild card too.

This is also the same method you use if you want to be sure that replaying a session does not affect your Omniture statistics. By telling RTV not to visit that URL, your RTV replays don’t get sent to the 3rd party site – hence they don’t impact the statistics reported.