A salute to Content Groups
WebTrends has a feature called Content Groups, which is simply the ability to glom together groups of pages and treat the groups as reportable entities.
If you can report on Pages, you can do the same kinds of reports with Content Groups.
The concept is so simple that a lot of people just file it under “uh huh, got it” without thinking about what it can be used for. It’s actually one of the biggest little features available, versatile and powerful.
Content Groups represent the opposite of the report granularity that gets touted and tooted all over the place. Content Groups do NOT allow you to drill down to the littlest sub-detail. Content Groups are used for drilling UP to the big picture.
Here are some ways to use content groups:
- Turn each of your KPIs into a content group.
- Then use Content Groups as a secondary dimension in custom reports. For the first dimension, use visit segmenting dimensions like new and return visitors, paid search keyword groups, referring domains, or entry pages. The resulting report will show, for each segment, the KPI activity for those visits. As one of our astute readers, Boston Matt, has pointed out, it acts like Google Analytics’ Goals.
- Or use Content Groups as a primary dimension in custom reports that have important kinds of filters. One interesting filter is based on search terms, and includes only search terms that are brand terms. Another would be its flip side —- all search terms that do not contain brand terms. If you’ve been paying attention to your search terms, you probably can think of quite a few subgroups that you’d like to examine for KPI activity.
- Define each vertical silo on your web site as a content group (leaving out the home page and other non-silo pages), and look for:
- intensity within each silo (pages per visit, or pages per visit as a proportion of available pages in the silo)
- degree to which visits contain more than one silo within a single visit (sum of visits to individual content groups, divided by number of visits to the site) – do you want people to visit more than one silo?
- general proportionality (each silo’s visits or page views as a percentage of the total) - is it what you’d expect or want?
- back-and-forth between silos (use Content Group Paths from Entry) – are visits staying entirely in a silo or flipping back and forth between two of them in a way that suggests confusion or perceived overlap?
- Put each horizontal level of your site into a content group, from the most general down to the deepest most visitor-committed level, and treat the collection of content groups as a funnel:
- how many visits get to each depth point in your site? Does it vary by source segment, or by entry page? Which entry page or segment produces the largest segment of deep visits?
Here are some tips and details:
- A content group can be just one page. It doesn’t always have to be a set of pages.
- You can use tags or the admin interface to make content groups. We favor the UI because you can make new ones or adjust existing ones whenever you want.
- If a content group is a collection of pages, a “visit” to that content group means “a visit that included any of the pages in the group.” If the visit hit ten different pages, all in Content Group A, the Content Groups report will display that activity as 1 visit, 10 page views for Content Group A.
- It’s handy to define one universal content group that will give you, in the Content Groups report, the total visits and total page views for the whole site. You can get the same thing from the Overview Dashboard, but with a Universale content group in your CGs report you don’t have to flip back and forth. The definition of that content group can be “*”.
- If you have a reasonable number of mutually exclusive content groups the Content Group Paths From Entry report is probably going to be really interesting. “Reasonable number” means no more than five or six. “Mutually exclusive” means no page can be in more than one content group – otherwise you get mush for results.
- As a dimension, Content Groups is a HIT dimension, not a visit dimension. You can’t have it as a primary dimension and something like new vs returning visitors as a secondary dimension. See more on these restrictions here.
- If you want Unique Visitors stats for content groups, you have to collect the Content Group of Interest parameter in each hit in the content group, and when analyzing you must have Visitor History for Content Groups turned on.
- If you want a content group drilldown report (content groups and content subgroups) you have to define them with parameters – WT.cg_n and WT.cg_s respectively. I have no idea why WT doesn’t have this in the user interface definition capability.
- If you want Unique Visitors as a measure for content group reports, WebTrends requires they be defined using the WT.cg_n parameter (and a special switch in the Visitor History toggle set).
Finally, here’s a challenge for the advanced users. The WebTrends user interface allows you to set up many collections and combinations of URL stems, query parameters, and query parameter values as content groups. But there is one particular (somewhat minor) combination that the UI’s logic cannot handle. Be the first to describe the one we’re thinking of, and we’ll send you a WebTrends Outsider t-shirt!
25 comments
It’s not possible to configure content group nesting in the admin interface (content group –> sub-content group), therefor you need the query parameters WT.cg_n and WT.cg_s.
You’re absolutely right, although that wasn’t the obscure URL-logic thing I am thinking of. You get a big score for pointing this out. I didn’t cover doing content groups by tagging at all. Yes, you can set up content groups in the tags with the WT.cg_n parameter, and you can have subcontent groups (for a drilldown) if you also have WT.cg_s on the same page as WT.cg_n. The subgroups are not available at all in the UI, which I’ve always thought was extremely strange.
With the tagging solution, you have a whole lot less flexibility if you want to change anything and it can be a little tricky if the definition of your content groups depends on dynamic parameters.
Next try!
You need the query parameters and the “Content Group Unique Visitor Tracking” setting in the Visitor History to track content group activity for unique visitors (e.g. Content Groups of Interest Report)
Another thing I should’ve covered! In fact this one is so important that I’m going to go back and adjust the main posting text.
But no.
It has to do with defining a content group. It’s a particular set of circumstances, i.e. a particular combination of URLs that you want to define as a content group, but it cannot be done in the content group definition UI logic.
I think I cannot add more than one string to a content group definition, like “(/products/.*) | (/sale/.*)”.
Content groups can be set up with regular expressions using the | operator, so that’s not it.
It seems that the Regular Expression Test won’t work with an OR operator.
I’m pretty sure it does work; I just tested it with a simple a|b expression and it green-lighted it and showed the right response to various strings. If that’s what you mean by “OR” operator.
I don’t have an answer for the contest (yet) but I want a t-shirt.
I would disagree about it being minor or small.
You can’t have a URL that has a specific parameter and a URL that has no parameters in the same content group.
You can’t have one URL with a certain parameter and another URL with a different parameter in the same content group.
That’s got to be the answer. Really frustrating, and the only workaround I know of is URL Search and Replace.
Chris G is right; just came across it recently, and realized that “flaw”.
Darn! Chris gets the T-shirt again
That is exactly the problem, Chris G.
Bernd gets a t-shirt too for general high-level know-how. Bernd can you send a shipping address?
Hi,
I used standard web server log as data source. I tried to use wt.cg_n and wt.cg_s tags as URL query parameters to show content group and sub content group. WT.cg_n works well but wt.cg_s doesn’t work. Why? Dose it meant that webtrends doesn’t support wt.cg_s for standard web server log?
202.33.212.42 – - [10/Oct/2008:12:09:20 +0900] “GET /webtrends?WT.cg_n=step1 HTTP/1.1″ 200 – “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17″
212.15.212.42 – - [10/Oct/2008:12:09:40 +0900] “GET /webtrends?WT.cg_n=step2&WT.cg_s=sub1 HTTP/1.1″ 200 – “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17″
Thanks
I think you’re right. I just tried it with Apache-type logs. the N’s shows up perfectly in the regular Content Groups report, but the drilldown report (content groups and subgroups) is completely empty, neither N’s or S’s.
I think you should submit this as a bug. I wonder if WT will just say that it’s only meant for SDC logs that are in IIS format. I couldn’t find anything in the documentation about this shortcoming of Apache logs.
Hello,
I know another CG limit.
If you want to group every page under a folder except some pages. For example you want to group everything under /pages/ folder except 1.html.
And you don´t know exactly which pages are under this folder, so you cann´t explicitly setup them on the regular expression definition.
I want another t-shirt! hehe
Best Regards
Hmmm. I actually think there is a way to do this, with [ ] and ^. I’ll have to ask Mister Peabody, our resident regex Outsider.
Thanks rocky. I will submit this bug to WT.
I also want another t-shirt. -:)
Best Regards
Wait. I still haven’t checked with Mister Peabody!
I guess I need to get more t-shirts. Why not. The WebTrends Engage conference is coming up – wouldn’t it be funny.
Do you have any news form Mr Peabody?
Regards
Yes. Mister Peabody has informed me that the implementation of regular expressions on WebTrends will not allow this to happen, as far as he can tell. A standard regex implementation could be made to work, but the one on WebTrends doesn’t have all the features. So, Guillermo, you rule!
Great!
This is great stuff!
Would it be possible to report “Duration of Visit” per content group?
Good question. Answer is no. Not in WebTrends.
Would you want “total time in the content group, even if the visitor jumped around” or “time in the content group each time the visitor touched that content group”?
For the former, we have a solution but it involves a preprocessing script that we have been working on for quite some time. This is one of the many things that script does. If you are interested in being on the mailing list for that script, when and if we’re able to release it, please email or twitter us. It will be free.
Has anyone investigated why you can’t have sub-content groups in the UI, and if this is a feature that is coming soon??
BTW – great post. I wanted to thank you for the idea of using Content Groups as KPI measures. It simulates the “Goal” functionality in Google Analytics quite well in this regard — which answers a big question for my stakeholders who love that aspect of GA. Thanks!
Matt – I’m glad you pointed that out (about content groups being able to be used like Goals in Google Analytics). Regarding the sub-content groups being available only in tags and not in the UI — I agree. Let’s both put in feature requests and maybe it will resurface there as a possible improvement. As I think about what we would be able to do if we had more flexibility with sub content groups, I get more convinced that it would be really really useful. You could do things that you couldn’t possibly do with drilldowns. You’d have the equivalent of three-dimension custom reports!
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