Posts from — May 2008

Applies to Software, On Demand (for some extra $$)
Poking around in the WT admin interface you may have noticed many references to the “Visitor History.” Visitor history is used to save information about your users across visits. It enables WebTrends to keep track of and report on nice things like a particular visitor’s lifetime value […]

Newbie users, you might want to avert your eyes because this topic could make you think you’ll just never master this program.  There are so many ins and outs to know about, aren’t there. 
(Actually, newbies, you’ll probably never need to know 99% of this stuff so don’t let it get you down.  Most users never […]

WebTrends contains a little-known custom report dimension that will show trends within your reporting period.   Yes, you already get this with the trend graphs.  But this gives you a table — one table row per day of the month in a monthly report period.  Or one row per hour of the day in a daily report.   […]

(Applies to:  server log data sources, SDC)
If you are using server log files, have turned on “Retrieve HTML Page Titles, and if WebTrends doesn’t already know the title, WebTrends actually visits your site to collect the title.  Well, it visits what you’ve told it is the site.  It goes to the domain that you entered in the […]

If you have a PPC (pay-per-click) search effort happening, you may be allowing the PPC engines to loosely match your paid-for terms with various terms typed in by human searchers.

To keep abreast of what’s being matched to what (and maybe identify inappropriate matches that can be avoided by adding negative search terms, or get ideas for cheaper exact-match terms), try this report.

If you’re seeing results where there are visits but no page views, these are probably visits where non-page files are being requested and nothing else. Here are a couple of custom reports that will help you figure out what’s going on.

(Applies to:  Custom Reports)
This filter allows you to look at visits that contained a certain page … anywhere in the visit.
Other visit filters depend on the first page of a visit.  This one looks at the whole visit.  It’s wonderful.  A bit of a breakthrough in analytics, really.  WebTrends just slid it in a few versions ago without […]

Betcha didn’t know there are so many ways to affect this.  Usually you won’t care, but you might.  I don’t think anybody has ever listed them all side-by-side. 

Suppression of all query parameters — this is an on-off toggle in the Page Files Types and Download File Types screens, called “truncation.”  When truncated, the Pages report (and […]

WebTrends has a limited but extremely useful URL rewriter called URL Search & Replace, located in the Report Configuration list.   It allows you to change the URL in a log file line before WebTrends analyzes the line.   The interface is very logical.  Take a look at its setup screen - it’s worth knowing it’s there. 
Its […]

Here’s an easy way to see what SDC is sending to your SDC server, for any SDC-tagged page your browser is looking at.  Enter this in the address bar and hit Enter:
        javascript:alert(gImages[0].src);
For the same thing, but cut-and-pasteable, do:
        javascript:document.write(gImages[0].src);
Bookmark them so you can quickly do it anytime, on any page your browser is on.
 
If […]