Synchronous Tag

Your site's code guarantees priority for the synchronous Monetate tag. This allows the tag to display all content at the same time and deliver a consistent experience for your customers.

The synchronous tag loads via a blocking script and has the potential to slightly extend page load time. This tag doesn't display any visual artifact of your native site before Monetate's content renders. Although Monetate cannot guarantee that this call completes within a specified time range, internal testing revealed no material impact on the end user's experience.

For the synchronous tag to be most performant, use content masking for any action that you create using Action Builder. See Content Masking for more information.

Technical Details

The synchronous tag's content consists of two components: /entry.js and /custom.js.

entry.js

The /entry.js component does the following:

  • Adds any entry masks
    • Hides content affected by Monetate experiences
    • Optionally, applies any full-page experiences
    • Redirects the page if a full-page experience matches the current page and the user is within the experiment group
    • Requests the /custom.js file asynchronously
  • Client websites wait until this file loads and runs
  • Updates when changes occur to Monetate experiences or to the account

custom.js

The /custom.js component is an asynchronous script that does the following:

  • Reports track data (for example, URL, user, browser, etc.) and applies experiences
  • Rarely changes

Akamai manages both scripts. Monetate pushes updates to them when changes occur.

The synchronous tag loads in the same amount of data as the asynchronous version, but the browser caches most of this process for much longer, resulting in less time spent downloading scripts.

Illustration showing both synchronous Monetate tag and asynchronous Monetate tag request serves