Channels

At Spiny we've created a context called channel that will allow you to define your site's structure for Spiny's interpretation. The concept of channel persists through to the Spiny app and allows data break downs based on channel. Channels have 4 optional breakouts. We call these channel parts. Channel parts are tiered and as such a higher tier cannot be omitted with a nested tier defined. In the most simple form a channel can be designated like so:

Technology/Smartphones/Apple/iPhone

In the above iPhone article example Technology is the tier 1 channel, Smartphones is tier 2, Apple is tier 3, and iPhone is tier 4. If you wish to define a tier 4 channel then you will need to define tiers 1,2, and 3. If you only wanted to define tier 3 then tier 4 can be omitted. If you really only wanted to break out an article as an iPhone article you could define the channel as Technology/Smartphones/iPhone and this is perfectly acceptable.

While that example above is geared towards an article published the motivation behind channel was to create a universal manner in which define a site structure. This structure can be used for any type of site which isn't limited to just publishers but also database oriented sites, video platforms, and e-commerce sites.

Channel Strategy

As a general rule of thumb the more general the topic the earlier it should occur in the channel tiers. As can be seen from the example in the last section Technology is a very general topic and encompasses a wide range of topics. Smartphones is also quite general and can have many nested topics. It's only when we get to the 3rd tier that we start to see much more specificity with the brand name Apple and then further refine that to a specific Apple product iPhone.

Aside from the above your channel strategy truly depends on your business needs and how you would like to break out the reporting for content on your site.

Some customers have used it for a way to track sub sites(if not used in the network subproperty field) or even to track content that they leverage from other website for content syndication

Implementation

note

If you haven't yet implemented Orion you can save this step for once you've implemented Orion.

Channels currently must be manually implemented within your site code. Please work with your development team to ensure proper designations are passed to the Orion library. An example of how to specify channel can be found below.

orion.queue.push(function(){
  // When calling orion.init
  // Please be sure to apply the appropriate channel in the init call as this will pass to the initial page view event
  orion.init({
    // ... Implementation config
    context: {
      // ... Other contexts
      channel: 'Technology/Smartphone/Apple/iPhone'
    }
  });
  // If calling after orion.init
  orion.setContext('channel', 'Technology/Smartphone/Apple/iPhone');
});