Posts from — July 2008

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. Following is a how-to.

Regular Expressions are 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.

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.

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!

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. 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.