Tips, tricks, and pokes, just WebTrends Analytics

This is for WebTrends newbies who are ready to try a custom report.  We think, we hope, that WebTrends users who have hesitated to tackle this ultra-valuable feature will find it far easier than they thought.  Often, the hesitation is simply due to terminology issues!  We’ll go slow.

A “report” is simply a table just like you see everywhere in WebTrends’ results .  It’s just rows and columns.  The rows have labels and are a list of things, like a list of page URLs or referrers.  The columns have labels and contain numbers that quantify the things in the rows, like number of visits or number of page views … per “thing” on the “list”. 

Don’t read further until you have the above nicely fixed in your mental concept map.  List of things …  numbers for each thing on the list … the list of things goes down the side … the numbers for each thing go across.

Ready?

• The “list of things” is called a “Dimension“ in WebTrends.  WebTrends has a lot of ready-made dimensions, plus you can easily make additional ones.  

Examples of out-of-the-box dimensions:  Page URLs and titles.  Content Groups.  Referring sites.  Campaign names found in the WT.mc_id parameter.  Visitor’s cookie value.  Day of the week. New visitors and Return visitors. On-site search terms that appear in the parameter called WT.oss.

Examples of dimensions you can create:  Product names as found in your site’s “productID=” parameter.  Campaign names found in a parameter that has a name other than WT.mc_id.  Product colors as found in your site’s “color=” parameter.  On-site search keywords as found in a parameter called “searchterm” or something other than WT.oss. 

• The columns containing numbers are called ”Measures.”  Again, WebTrends has a lot of them already made.  In addition to the out-of-the-box ones, you can of course make additional ones..

Examples of out-of-the-box measures:  Number of visits.  Percent of total site visits.  Number of views.  Viewing time.  Number of orders. 

Examples of measures you can create:  Number of instances of the parameter “color” having the value “purple.”  Number of instances that contained the parameter “promocode=yes”.

Big point:  The two bullet points above, Dimensions and Measures, are in fact a basic custom report!   Making a custom report in WebTrends goes something like this, once you have opened the Custom Reports >> Reports >> New Custom Report screen:

1. You choose a dimension. 
2. You choose at least one measure.
3. You give the report a name and save it into the custom report pool. 
4. You attach it to a profile. 
5. You make sure the template will allow the report to be displayed. 
6. You analyze some data. 
7. You look at the data. 
8. If you don’t like the custom report you modify it or you can un-attach it from the profile and delete it from the pool of custom reports.

That’s the basic structure, but it’s of course not the whole story.  Here are the two other essential things:

• Use filters to make a custom report that shows data only for a subgroup of your overall data.   For example, you may want the custom report to display data only for first-time visitors, or visits from Google, or visits that included a purchase.  

Examples of out-of-the-box filters:  Day of the week is Sunday.  Entry page is URL “xxxx.”   Visitors are Returning.  Campaign ID (from WT.mc_id) is “zzzzz.”  Visits that did NOT arrive from a search engine. 

Examples of filters you can make:  Product page views where the product has the color parameter “purple” or “blue.”  Visits that contained at least one product page view where the product has the color parameter “purple” or “blue”.  Pages classified as error pages.  Visits that arrived through search terms that contained your company’s name.  On-site search terms that returned no results, i.e. that had a value of zero for the parameter than shows number of search results returned. 

• If you want, you can nest one dimension inside another, in a so-called 2-dimension Custom Report.  For example, you can nest the “Page URLs Viewed” dimension inside the “New vs Return Visitor” dimension.   The result would be a list of all the Page URLs Viewed by New visitors, followed by another list of Page URLs Viewed, this time by Return visitors.  All in the same report.  The “outside” dimension (New vs Return in this example) is called the Primary dimension and the inner nested dimension is called the Secondary dimension and the whole thing is a Two-Dimension Report.  By the way, when you’re ready, The WebTrends Outsider has a post with more details about the ins and outs of 2D custom reports.

Finally, there are some smaller details that you don’t have to worry about until you’re fairly comfortable making custom reports:

• If you want your report to show a trend graph (over time) for a particular measure you have to tell WebTrends to do so, by checking the “use interval data” box.  Otherwise WebTrends will conserve database space by not storing the day-by-day info necessary for a trend graph.
• If you have a trend graph, the first measure will be the one graphed in the default view.  Keep this in mind as you decide on your measures.
• Check the box “Exclude activity without dimension data” if you don’t want a “None” row in your data for hits/visits that don’t fit the dimension.  We recommend not checking this box while you test your report, because the “None” row can help with troubleshooting.
• If you use both Include and Exclude filters, remember that Exclude filters trump Include ones.

Having covered the basic concepts and structure of a custom report and hoping you’ll just want to jump in and feel your way through the setup of one, we want to add this:

The hard part of custom reports is deciding what should be the dimension and filtering. Really.  It is not always easy to translate some vague “I wanna know …” question into specifics of dimensions and filters.  If this stumps you, don’t be discouraged.  You will get better at it as your mind wraps itself around this way of thinking.

To get examples of some custom reports that have been explicitly described here in the Outsider, go to the Cool Custom Reports category.  A few of them are a little high-level but you’ll see custom report logic in action.

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

The report we describe here is a good one for understanding visitors’ interactions with your on-site search.  It focuses on people who do an on-site search and then, for some reason, immediately search again with a different search term.   In the on-site search biz, the second term is called the “refined” term. 

If somebody makes a second search immediately, they may have thought the first results were too broad (too many results), or perhaps they didn’t get appropriate-looking (or any) results the first time. 

This two dimension report shows the first term they used, paired with the second (refined) term.  

In the analyzed report you’ll find a lot of misspellings (and people’s re-attempts to get it right).  More importantly, you’ll get a sense of visitors’ persistence as they try to find the elusive correct vocabulary for what they want … where “correct vocabulary” all too often means what your site’s copy writers used. 

Overall, if you pay attention to how they refine their first term, you’ll get a better idea of what they wanted on their first search.  This report can help you improve your site’s vocabulary so it more closely matches the vocabulary your visitors use on their first search attempt. 

Report Construction

This report requires that your search results page’s URL contains the search term used in the search.  In other words, it must be something like “/searchresults.aspx?keyword=wild+haggis” or “/searchresults.aspx?WT.oss=wild+haggis”.

As said above, this report has two nested dimensions.  The whole thing depends on a hit filter that allows only search results pages that were immediately preceded by another search results page.  The primary dimension is the search term displayed in the URL of the previous hit (the referring page).  The secondary dimension is the search term displayed in the URL of the current hit.   Got that?

We’ve described the primary dimension previously, in this post on on-site search terms.   It’s basically the search term for the immediately preceding search.  There’s a cool trick to extracting the on-site search term for the previous hit, detailed in the other post.

The secondary dimension is the on-site search term parameter for the current hit (”WT.oss=” or “keyword=” or something else) .

The report filter is -

• a hit filter
• “must match ALL criteria” 
• first criterion:  URL is a search results page (searchresults.aspx or whatever)
• Second criterion:  Referring Page (per hit) is a search results page (searchresults.aspx or whatever)

That’s it.  Ask if you have questions.  One desirable thing that you can’t get out of this report is detail when three or more searches are strung together.  This report only deals with pairs.  If somebody searched three times in a row, their first pair (search #1 and #2)  will be in the report and so will their second pair (#2 and #3), but there will be no way to see #1 and #3 together.

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

If you set up your pay-per-click program so landing pages contain the parameter WT.srch=1, WebTrends Analytics has some out-of-the-box reports that will use WT.srch to generate info on paid search engines and terms.

You can also use WT.srch=1 yourself to create filters for pay-per-click traffic, for example to look at geography or to look at natural search by filtering PPC out.

If you want to go all-out, you can bump up your WebTrends arrangement to include the services of Dynamic Search, a separate WebTrends offering that does a sophisticated job of tracking and, especially, automatically managing bids and placements.  For extensive programs, the payoffs for automated bid management tend to be spectacular compared to even skilled human management.

However, if you don’t have Dynamic Search you will still want much more PPC reporting than what WT.srch gives you.  

Why?  The problem with the canned WebTrends Analytics paid search reports is that they are designed to report only on search-related information that’s in the referrer field of the landing page.  In these days of broad matching, that’s pretty much useless to your PPC management efforts. 

• The referrer field contains only the actual search terms used and the actual engine where the ad appeared.  The referrer field does not reveal the terms you paid for, much less the match type, so there’s no way to connect a visit to your program’s operating details - the terms and match type you paid for, the keyword subgroup, how much you paid, and so on.  And, possibly worst of all, you can’t even match the actual search engine (AOL, myway, etc) to its formal affiliated PPC network - Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
• Furthermore, you may not realize that a substantial number of PPC visits have no recorded referrer at all !  In a large site’s records that we examined recently, Google’s PPC visits had 19% “no referrer” visits; Yahoo topped 12%, and MSN had around 5%.  (Go here for possible reasons for direct traffic visits) 

All of this points to one solution that involves some work on your part >>>  get extra tracking parameters into the destination (landing) page URL. 

If you put tracking parameters in the destination landing page, those parameters will be there even if the referrer field is empty.  And they will allow you to track the business value of visits in ways that influence the management of your PPC spending.

The tracking parameters you get into the destination URL should consist of some or all of the following:

• The mother program for the PPC ad (Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, Microsoft search advertising, etc. 
• The actual term paid for
• The match type, which varies from program to program.  Its values might be “broad,” “exact,” “phrase,” “advanced,” “standard,” or possibly “content match.”
• The site on which the ad was displayed when the user clicked on it
• A campaign or group ID that corresponds to how you have the term grouped in the PPC admin program.
• A subcampaign or subgroup ID that corresponds to the optional subgroup in the PPC admin program
• Whether the PPC ad is text or image
• The ad copy variation (the “creative”) that the visitor clicked on  (Google’s ad optimization program, for example, rotates ad copy for you.  Knowing the text that the visitor actually saw is essential for doing your own evaluation of alternatives) 
• And finally, as a sort of obvious overkill, the fact that the visit comes from paid search (the aforementioned WT.srch, value of 1) 

 If you don’t track and report on the quality of visits coming from at least some of the above additional PPC factors, in my humble opinion you shouldn’t be bothering to use WT.srch=1 at all.

This is all so important to your PPC efforts that we’ll be devoting a number of posts to it since there doesn’t seem to be much documentation anywhere else. 

The custom reports and filters related to these parameters are not hard to set up. 

Getting these parameters to happen in the first place is harder.  It’s a different process for each of the big three:  Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and MSN search advertising.

The easiest one by far is Yahoo Sponsored Search, and we’ve posted a how-to here.

And here’s a design for a custom report that shows which actual search terms were matched (by the PPC program) to the terms you actually paid for.

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

This post covers a lot of short WebTrends related questions that jump out at us when we look at our on-site and off-site search reports.  The topics range from critical ones like DCS Multitrack and increasing the length of reports to little guys like seeing a # sign in URLs.  We’ve also noted some big topics that we’ve put into our backlog of let’s-do-a-whole-post-on-this.

If you did one of these searches and think we misinterpreted what you are after, let us know!

1. Chantilly, Virginia,  The number one miscellaneous search!  — It’s the home base for IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and thus is the geographic location for many IPs that don’t have listings in DNS or GeoTrends.  Same for Marina del Rey, California.  The state of Virginia is also the home base for AOL’s North American traffic, but the cities vary - Dulles, Manassas, etc.   For US sites, Chantilly will almost always be in the top 5 cities and Virginia will likely be the top state. 
2. Anything having to do with the WebTrends parameter WT.oss — Lots of searches for this one.  Check out our on-site search category.  We’ll try to do more in this general area. 
3. Does the parameter have to be WT.oss in order to report on on-site search?  — One thing people may not understand is that many on-site search engines already produce a satisfactory equivalent for WT.oss on their results pages (query=, words=, term=, q=) that allows you to adapt any of WT’s prebuilt custom on-site search reports to use the different parameter name.
4. What about deleting old log files — The quick answer (in our opinion) is “never.”  You can zip them to a tenth their size and store them.  If they are server logs, you can first edit out image, css, and js hits then zip them, and their final size will be about one percent of the original.  You never know if you’ll need them again.
5. In the Pages report, you are seeing pages that do not exist on your site — We can think of two possible answers.  If you’re using log files, then somebody could be retyping your URLs or purposely asking for non-existent pages, sometimes for nefarious reasons.  If you’re using SDC logs, somebody could have copied your page code to their site without realizing the SDC tag would send signals back to you, with their URLs (and domain names) attached.  For the latter, if you don’t have a report on “multi-homed domains” to look at from time to time, make one.  Once in a while this becomes a very exciting report!
6. Does WebTrends keep track of dynamic pages that have query parameters?  — Absolutely yes.  You have a lot of ways to get that information.  The quickest but possibly messiest is to go to Page File Types and turn OFF the “truncate parameters” setting for your page file type.  (To clean up the mess somewhat, investigate the URL Rebuilding function which will allow only your favorite parameters in the reports.)  The more roundabout way is to make reports on the values of just those query parameters, one by one.  The URL Parameter Analysis settings are a good place to start.  If you know Custom Reports, you can make ones for the parameters of interest.
7. What’s the difference between a URL Parameter Analysis report and a Custom Report on a parameter?  — The subtext for this search is probably “why bother with custom reports on a parameter?  URL Parameter Analysis does the same thing and is easier.”  There are three main reasons:  1)  A custom report can be set up to have more and different measures, 2) A custom report can be placed somewhere logical in your template, close to related reports, while a URL Parameter Analysis report is always stuck in the same section of the template as all other URL Parameter Analysis reports, and 3) URL Parameter Analysis does not work with the ODBC driver and therefore can’t be automatically pulled in to Excel.
8. Where is the screen resolution report in WebTrends?  — It’s in Site Design >> Browsers and Systems >> Client Details, in the out-of-the-box ”Complete View” template.
9. What is a “page view” in WebTrends licensing?  — Licensing is based on page view limits.  The answer is somewhat complicated and may change so you should ask your account manager for the details and for confirmation of what’s said here.  Usually people on this want to know three things:  1) What file types don’t count as pages views?  (answer:  Images and css files are two main ones.  There are others.)  2) Can I cut down on page views by filtering out certain ones?  (answer:  No, not if WebTrends is doing the filtering.  The act of filtering is a page view action.  You can however remove lines from the logs before WebTrends sees them.)  3)  If I re-analyze logs, or analyze the same logs in more than one profile, does my license get charged a second time?  (answer:  No.  You can re-analyze the same logs as often as you want without it counting against your license.  But don’t alter or move a log because then WebTrends may not be able to tell that it has already analyzed that file.)
10. Does WebTrends SDC track off-site links (links that go to other sites)?  — Yes, you have to use the Tag Builder’s advanced tag, and set up the tag so it knows what domains to consider “on-site” versus “off-site.”  The tag watches for links going to those domains and records clicks on those particular links.
11. Does WebTrends SDC track downloads of files that cannot be tagged, such as pdf, doc, txt, wmv, mp3?  — Yes. You have to use the Tag Builder’s advanced tag, and set up the tag so it knows what untaggable file extensions  it should record as downloads.  The tag watches for links going to those kinds of files and records clicks on those particular links. 
12. Does WebTrends SDC track form button events (submittals of forms)?  — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this if your form button uses one of four common submittal actions.  This is probably worth a whole post unless WebTrends already has the documentation for it.  We haven’t checked.
13. Why should I make the advanced tag track form button events (submittals of forms) if I have acknowledgement pages for every form?  — Good point.  You probably should turn off this part of the tag.  The acknowledgement page is usually all you need.
14. Does WebTrends SDC track javascript links and events?  — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this but you have to be careful about the names and labels in the javascript in order to not end up with gibberish.  This is probably worth a whole item unless WebTrends already has the documentation for it.
15. Does WebTrends SDC track clicks on links that go from one part of a web page to another (anchor tags, bookmark anchors)?  — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this.
16. What does it mean when the Pages report shows some URLs with # (pound sign) in them?  — They are clicks on an anchor or bookmark link in your page code; see the preceding item.
17. How can I remove the # from the URLs in reports?  — You can use WebTrends’ URL Search & Replace function to remove the entire anchor name including the #.  Or you can change the SDC tag to turn off recording of these.
18. Why can’t I find documentation for DCS Multitrack?  — Embarrassingly, it actually disappeared from documention some time after May 2006 as far as we can tell.  Who knows why.   DCS Multitrack is the key to all of the SDC Tag Builder’s advanced tag event tracking, and it’s useful on its own even without the advanced tag, so it really, well REALLY, needs to be documented.
19. I am using v. 8.0 and can’t find a link to the Tag Builder.   Will the Tag Builder tag work with 8.0?  Do I have to upgrade?  How do I find the Tag Builder?  — All the tag builder does is grab extra analyzable information and puts it into the SDC logs.  Pretty much any version of WebTrends can work with those parameters, though not all versions have the right pre-configured reports.   You definitely don’t need to upgrade to 8.5 software, though it’s not a bad idea, if you are a software user.   You should however (if you host your own SDC) consider upgrading SDC to a recent version, which is 8.0d right now.  If you are an On Demand user you already have 8.5 of Analytics and 8.0d of SDC.  The general address is http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com.    See also this Outsider post. 
20. What is “the same visit“?   — If WebTrends doesn’t see any activity from a visitor’s cookie in 30 minutes, any additional activity won’t be “the same visit.”  (30 minutes is the out-of-the-box inactivity time-out length.  You can change it to something else and there are good reasons for having it longer.) 
21. How does WebTrends SDC handle https pages?  — The SDC server has to have an SSL certificate and the .gif request in the tag has to be changed from http:// to https://. 
22. Why doesn’t WebTrends report on time-to-serve?  — Probably because your server logs are Apache, which does not record this.  IIS does.  If you have IIS logs, the time-to-serve stat can be found as the right-most column in the Pages report.
23. How can I make the Search Phrases and Keywords Reports show more search terms?  — For standard (non-custom) reports you can change the number of displayed rows in any report by going to Web Analysis >> Options >> Analysis >> Table Sizes then changing the “Report Limit.”  Note that this will change the limit for all your profiles.  For custom reports you can do the same by editing the individual profile and going to Analysis >> Table Sizes then changing the “Report Limit.”  There are disk space and performance implications for increasing report table sizes so don’t get carried away.

Those are all the easy-to-answer queries we’ve found in on-site and external search reports for June and July.  Phew.  That’s a lot of search terms to read through.  If we get a good response to this item we’ll try to do it every month.  Thanks for all the traffic!

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

Applies to: software

The new search engine Cuil was announced today. If you want to add it to your WebTrends setup, it’s very easy provided you can edit the WebTrends installation files.

The file you have to change is called keywords.ini.

There are usually two or three copies of keywords.ini on the typical WebTrends installation. Typical locations are:

/WebTrends/modules/analysis/engine/8.0d (8.1, 8.5, etc)
/WebTrends/storage/config/component/lookupdata/
/WebTrends/storage/config/engine/8.0d (8.1, 8.5, etc)

Open the first instance of keywords.ini with a proper text editor. By “proper” we mean something like TextPad rather than Notepad, because Notepad doesn’t play well with the system when the file is in use. With TextPad, you can [usually] take the risk of changing the file while WebTrends is running.

Step 1 - Change the Engine list. Go to the end of the long Engine list. Find the last numbered entry. It’ll look something like this:

Engine337=Looksmart (if your last numbered entry is 337)

Add a line using the next number, like this:

Engine338=Cuil

Step 2 - Add the specifications.  Go to the end of the specification list (groups of three or four lines).  The last one might look like this (if your last one is Looksmart)

[LookSmart]
ID1=looksmart.com
KeywordIndicator1=key=

Add a blank line and then this:

[Cuil]
ID1=cuil.com
KeywordIndicator1=q=


Step 3.  Save and close the file.

Step 4.  Make the same changes to other copies of keywords.ini in your installation.

 That’s all it takes.  If you’re wondering where we got the specification for the KeywordIndicator line, we just went to cuil.com, did a search, and looked at the name of the query parameter containing the search keyword.  It’s “q” just like Google.

No, The WebTrends Outsider is NOT in their index.  Obviously Cuil is not very hip.

One last thing. Here is a Cool Custom Report that will show you any gaps in your keywords.ini file.

• Dimension: Referring Site
• Filter:  Exclude Search Engines

The referring sites in the resulting report are those that are not being counted as search engines.  Enjoy.

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

The other day, we saw a thing by Somebody-or-Other that finished with this warning: “and besides, with WebTrends you have to use regular expressions.”

Oooh, regular expressions.  Run and hide under the bed.

There are two points wrong with Somebody-or-Other’s statement.  First, we don’t know of anywhere in WebTrends where you HAVE to use regular expressions.  In WebTrends it’s always an optional alternative way to tell WebTrends what to filter or collect into content groups, etc.

Second, it’s not a big deal.  If you’ve already mastered the asterisk (*) wildcard, extending that skill to regular expressions will take about two minutes.  At least, it will take that long for the baby version of regular expressions that will get you through about 99.99% of your WebTrends needs.

WebTrends does have a full regular expression engine and there’s no question that full-fledged regular expressions can be magnificently cringe-inducing.  I, personally, get more intimidated by a hearty regex than by a whole pageful of perl. 

But as said above you’ll probably never need more than baby regexes. 

(If you do develop an advanced need just call a geeky friend.  Geeky friends love to puzzle out advanced regular expressions.  Or ask on the WebTrends user forum where several regex mavens hang out.)

So this post is dedicated to those newish users of WebTrends who perceive the Regular Expression checkbox as solid proof that WebTrends is too technical and who have avoided that checkbox like the plague.

(To be honest, the name “regular expression” could be the most complicated thing about regular expressions, at least in this context.   What a dumb name.  ”Regular Expression” just means “flexible way of matching.”   If it were called ”advanced wildcards” would it make you more comfortable?)

You really only need to know two things about regular expressions (regexes) to start using them in WebTrends.

• The simplest regular expression is just the characters you want to match.   No fancy symbols.  Suppose you want a content group that contains everything that’s an article, and all article filenames have the word “article” in them (like, “article1234.htm”)  This can be handled by the simplest form of a regular expression which is just the text that’s common to everything you want to match - in this case “article”.   In other words, it’s the same as text-match for *article* (which is NOT a regular expression because * has a funky meaning in  regular expressions).  
  
Not very impressive, right?  You’re thinking, “this simplest kind of regular expression doesn’t do anything that ordinary wildcards can’t do.”   Ha!  Note that it saves you from typing asterisks!  That counts a LOT. 
  
There’s one little catch if there’s any punctuation in your regular expression text, for example if you’re using “article.doc.” You need to put a backslash before the punctuation.  Like this.  “article\.doc”   (There’s a lot more to it but remember we’re giving you the pablum version.) 

• The other majorly useful regex thingy is the pipe character “|“  (vertical bar).  It means “OR”.  So, “article|document” will match anything that has either article or document in it. Now it’s getting more interesting, right?  You can’t do that with asterisks. 
  
Do you see how helpful this is in setting up a content group that will contain all article and document files?   This is, IMHO, worth the price of admission right there.

You can stop here if you want.  But if you have the courage to know just a bit more, here are two others.

•  If you want your match to happen only if your string is found at the very beginning or the very end , then you can use two other special characters, ^ and $.  They are used only at the beginning or the end of the regular expression, respectively.  If you want a filter that will match yahoo.com but not www.yahoo.com, use ^yahoo because the ^ requires matching at the very beginning.  And yahoo.com$ will match www.yahoo.com but not yahoo.com.au, because the $ demands that your string match the very end.   And yahoo without either ^ or $ will of course match all the above. 
  
Okay.  Take a deep breath.  Read it again slowly.  You’ll get it, I promise.

• Maybe you have variable stuff you want to ignore in the middle of what you want to match.  For example suppose you’re making a content group that includes all product articles, like “/products/vorpal-blades/article.htm” and “/products/slithy-toves/article.htm” but not anything like “/press-releases/vorpal-blades/article.htm”.  You need something that means “matches any kinda junk here in the middle.”  The something is .*  - that’s dot asterisk. 
  
So, your choice of regular expressions for the above situation would be: 
        /products/.*/article 
        products/.*/article 
        oducts/.*/articl 
        /products/.*/artic
        cts/.*/artic
        /produ.*/artic
        cts/.*rticle
        and so forth … lotsa choices but I’d go with the first

This just scratches the surface of regular expressions but as a WebTrends user the surface is exactly where you’ll be most of the time.  Calloo!  Callay!

Oh.  About the asterisk in the title.  That’s a footnote.  Just having a little wildcard pun.

Lewis Carroll, if you didn’t know.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

Comparing the behaviors of first-time visitors to veteran visitors can be a real eye-opener. 

Unless you take a close look at first-time and veteran visitors separately, you won’t know if your site works exquisitely for people who are already familiar with it but is an overwhelming unhelpful mess for newbies.  Or the other way around. 

Happily, WebTrends makes it easy (if you know how) to separate first-timers from experienced visitors. 

The first-time-versus-veteran-visitor report is so fruitful that we return to it every couple of months.  Here are some things we’ve found in past analyses that would not have been evident from an undifferentiated look:

• Pattern uncovered:  First-timers linger on the home page and then apparently give up on the navigation they see there and use on-site search instead.  Veterans on the other hand use the navigation because they’ve apparently become familiar with the site structure or labels.  (alternative interpretation:  first-timers who use on-site search just don’t come back!)  Lesson:  Do user studies of the home page and find that the labels are baffling first-timers.  Do simple text changes that produce big changes for first-timers who enter at the home page.
• Pattern uncovered:  A variation of the above.  First-timers plunge into the navigation and after flailing around for several clicks they resort to on-site search.  Veterans meanwhile go immediately to on-site search.  Lesson:  Do user studies with veterans and find out why the navigation still doesn’t work for them after they know the site fairly well.   Find that the site’s huge numbers of products are sorted into product groups using a categorization approach that doesn’t fit with how the public thinks.  Allow products to be in more than one silo and change categorization to fit with card sorting exercises done in the user studies.
• Pattern uncovered:  A big chunk of first-timers use search but revert to using navigation because the search results are useless.  Veterans know about the typical irrelevance of search results and hardly ever use search.  Lesson:  Identify some common search terms, run the searches, show results page to management and get immediate funding for fixing search. 
• Pattern uncovered:  The main distinguisher between first-timers and veterans’ page views is the Advisor feature.  Returning visitors have found that the Advisor is a great way to narrow down their choices intelligently.  First-timers don’t know what “advisor” is and use it late in the visit if at all.  Lesson:  Make Advisor more prominent and explain it better.  Watch for better KPIs and return visits among first-timers.
• Pattern uncovered:  Visitors’ first and second visits resemble each other a lot.  But somewhere around the third visit, they diverge.  The later visits include more product detail, specifications, downloads, comparisons, and warranty views.  Lesson:  you’ve discovered some of the timing of the decision cycle and a major dropout point in the multi-visit decision process.  Create an email campaign just for two-visit people.  Also, change one of the home page teaser panels to show content typical of late visits so visitors know it’s available.  Increase the amount and depth of the advanced information since it seems to be an enabler for eventual purchase decisions.
• Pattern uncovered:  First-timers are brought to the site by generic search terms.  Veterans almost always arrive by brand-specific search terms, if they use search engines at all.  Lesson:  make sure paid search terms that are generic go to landing pages that sell the visitor on your company as a whole and provide other first-time-critical info.  Monitor conversion and retention rates for the revised landing pages, concentrating on effects on first-timers.
• Pattern uncovered:  A large proportion of first-timers go directly to the “clearance” part of the site and then leave without looking at regular-priced offerings.  Apparently they are being brought to the site in large numbers by bargain-hunting sites.   Lesson:  make sure the clearance pages have lead-ins to related non-clearance content, with persuasive text about your company’s value propositions.
• Pattern uncovered:  Veteran visitors to your travel site use the “my dates are flexible” button almost half the time, while first-timers hardly ever use it.  Lesson:  make the button more prominent and add a “what’s this?” explanation that showcases the value of this feature.  After the change, monitor first-timer behavior especially with respect to use of that feature, conversion, and return visits.

Convinced?  Want to try it?  WebTrends makes it easy because the count of past visits by each visitor is a special parameter attached to the first hit of every visit after the visitor’s first visit. 

• You must be sessionizing with a persistent cookie to get at this information.
• You must have visitor history turned on
• You must have enough past history to be confident that a first-time visitor is, in fact, probably new to your site (as opposed to simply being new to the WebTrends cookie)
• You must have enough visitors to make the subgroups large enough to give statistically reliable results.  I wouldn’t base any decisions on fewer than 5,000.

It’s important to realize that the best cutoff point between newbie visitor and veteran may vary from site to site.  A common starting point for the definition of “veteran” is the fourth visit.  It depends on your site’s audience.  Explore.

Here’s the generic way to create custom reports on Pages (or content groups or scenario analyses or whatever you want as a dimension) for visitors with different amounts of site experience. 

To make a filter that includes only first-time visitors: 

• Create a custom visit filter based on New versus Return.  The screen will refresh giving you radio buttons for New or Return.  Choose New.

To make a filter that includes only visitors with at least three visits:

• Create a custom filter of the Visit type.  Filter on Entry Page, matching values equal to *.  (The asterisk  means it doesn’t matter what page the visit started on. )   Do not check the Regular Expression box.  Specify a URL parameter named WT.vr.vc with a value of >3 (if you want 3 to be your cutoff point).  Make sure you also indicate that this is a numeric parameter, or else the “greater than” sign won’t mean anything.

That’s it.  Apply each parameter to its own custom report with a dimension of Pages or Content Groups or Scenario or whatever you like.   Compare using your favorite comparison method.

If you’re curious about how we know about WT.vr.vc, look in the “Visitor History Parameters” section of the Administration User’s Guide, available in the Product Documentation section of the Customer Center.  There are nine types of visitor history parameters!

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

Applies to Software, On Demand

If you’ve had the opportunity to take a look under the hood of your SDC page tag (and you understand javascript) then you should be pleasantly surprised at how readable the SDC tag is. Take a look at almost any other tool and you’ll find an obfuscated mess. There is not a chance that you could modify how those work. But the SDC tag? Go ahead and hack it up to your heart’s content! (Sidenote: This points to a fundamental difference between WebTrends and most other tools: WebTrends wants you to customize, to make it work just how you want it to work. The price is that you can screw things up monumentally, but if you don’t have a cookie cutter site then why would you want a cookie cutter analytics tool?)

There are probably some WebTrends’ Insiders who are breaking out in a cold sweat after reading that. In the past I have been discouraged by WT from messing with the code. Talk of upgrades and difficulty of support were bandied around, and ignored by me. Just try to segregate your additions and comment your modifications and you’ll be fine. The code is pretty mature and it doesn’t tend to change much from version to version so additions and modifications are usually fairly easy to port to a new version of the tag.

That said, it must be noted that WT just rolled out http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com. This is a nifty new tool that will create customized code that contains only what you need it to contain. The code it puts out has also been completely re-written from the previous standard WT code. It is still readable, but now it’s all object oriented. Very fancy, and it requires slightly more sophisticated javascript knowledge if you want to customize it without making a mess of the whole thing.

So anyway, what are some common customizations? Here are a few simple ones:

• Translate some sort of information on your page into a standard WT variable. There are a bunch of ways to do this that don’t involve modifying the Javascript, but sometimes it’s easiest to just say WT.xyz = myVariable in the code. That way you can add all sorts of If..Then’s and such to get it just right.
• Modify the page title. Many sites have very useless or repetitive title tags. Writing a bit of Javascript to pull actual useful information into the WT.ti tag can make your reports much more readable. Examples include stripping out your company name if it appears in every single title tag, replacing the title with a main header from the page body, or parsing the URL and extracting a useful page title from that.
• Pull in information from 3rd party iframes on your page. These are starting to become pretty common as sites contract with other companies to provide services or content. Examples of these 3rd party services include product reviews, FAQs, maps and news. Typically information in these iframes isn’t available to the WT tag because they often load after the tag fires. What to do? Write some javascript that delays the tag firing until the iframes are loaded and you’ve got the information you need from them. (This can be tricky because you don’t want to miss short page views that are over before the delay is up, but a smart javascripter can make sure the tag fires almost all the time.)

How have you modified the WT tag?

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

The length of a visit (in terms of time) is one of the most unsatisfactory web analytics statistics no matter what analytics product you use. 

One obvious reason is that you can’t really correlate the length of time with actual visitor attention, even if you do have good numbers about how long the site was on the screen.  The less obvious reason is that the numbers just aren’t very good to begin with.  Because “time on a page” requires knowing the time the page was requested AND the time the next page was requested, there is no way to know the viewing time for pages that didn’t have a next page - i.e. single page visits or the final page in a visit.

WebTrends calculates the Average Visit Length by adding all the known page view times and dividing by the number of visits.  The result is a rather funky number, especially if you have a lot of single page visits because their lengths will be O and they’ll drag the average down.   If you want to get something a little more realistic, calculate the average yourself but in the denominator first subtract the number of single page visits from the “total visits.”  To be even more accurate, make an estimate of how long people spent on the average last page of the average visit, and add that number of seconds to the average visit time.

But if you really want to know how long people spent on a page for a single page visit, you might want to look at the following “pulse” code (lifted from an entry by Josh A and a comment by GB on the WebTrends User Forum).  In this example, the code fires the SDC tag every 10 seconds up to 3 times.  The result is logs containing hits that look like this:

     /page.asp
     /page.asp?elapsedtime=10
     /page.asp?elapsedtime=20
     /page.asp?elapsedtime=30

Here’s the code. 

var interval = 10;
var maxcount = 3;
var pgtimer = 0;
function pgtimer() {
    pgtimer+=interval;
    if (typeof(window["dcsMultiTrack"])=="function"){
        if (window.location.search)
            dcsMultiTrack('DCS.dcsqry',window.location.search+"&elapsedtime="+pgtimer);
        else
            dcsMultiTrack('DCS.dcsqry',"?elapsedtime="+pgtimer);
        if (pgtimer<(maxcount*interval) setTimeout("pgtimer()",interval*1000);
    }
}
if((typeof(pgtimer)=="function")&&(document.referrer.indexOf(window.location.host)<0) setTimeout("pgtimer()",interval*1000);

The javascript code will continue to “pulse” until the maxcount is hit as long as the page is still open in a browser.  The code is pretty basic.  It can be enhanced, for example, to only execute on the first page view of a visit.

You could also code something similar even if you’re using log files.

You *don’t* want to put this on every page on your site because it will fluff up your log files to an extreme degree. 

Placing it on a critical entry page, and possibly setting it to execute only one time after a decent interval, might be all you really need.   

For example, here’s a Cool Custom Report that shows how many single page visits to your home page lasted less than 10 seconds.   Add the script to your home page and set the interval to 10 and maxcount to 1.  Any home page view shorter than 10 seconds won’t have the elapsedtime parameter, while views longer than 10 seconds will have the parameter.  You’ll have to create two custom report visit-type filters: 

•  a custom report visit-type filter with two match criteria (must match “all”):  visits of length 1 page, and entry at home page
• another custom report visit-type filter that excludes visits where the entry page contains the “elapsedtime” parameter 

 The dimension for this report can be anything you want, and the measure should be “visits.”

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)

Applies to:  Software

“Danger!” 
“Don’t remind me of old heartbreak.” 
“Aargh.” 

These are a few of the reactions by Outsiders to mentions of the Re-Analyze function in WebTrends.  

To its credit, WebTrends a while ago renamed it to ”Clear Analysis Data” and shows a warning when asking you to confirm this action:  “Any previously analyzed data will be lost.”   

However, in 8.1 WebTrends renamed it again, back to “Re-Analyze.”  Confusion and danger return.

Let’s make that little warning really clear.  It means:  Should you go ahead with a re-analyze, ALL previous processing will be erased, along with all WebTrends-controlled backups.  Your configurations stay, but WebTrends deletes all statistics and all backups and starts analysis over with the earliest raw data it can find. 

The old data is really gone.  There is no “restore” unless you have a tape backup. 

It can ruin your day.

Experienced WebTrends users instead use this simple alternative:  create a clone (copy) of the profile and analyze it.  When it’s done and you’ve checked it, you can delete the original.   

And never touch “Re-Analyze.”

Tags

Posts that WordPress seems to think are related :)