Cool custom report: Drill down through your directory structure

Applies to:  SDC data collection

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a drilldown report based on your directory structure?

FYI, WebTrends has two different drilldown-building methods. The complicated one involves specifying each level of the drilldown, where each level is based on a different parameter. The easy way involves specifying just one parameter — but that one parameter needs to contain all the levels of your drilldown.

Both methods are based on parameters. And your directory structure is in the URL, not in a parameter, so you can’t base a drilldown on it.

(dramatic pause)

Or can you?

WELL, ahem, SDC just happens to automatically collect a special parameter that contains the directory structure for every hit. It’s called WT.es. No, we don’t know what “es” is supposed to stand for.  (later comment:  we are informed that “es” stands for “event source” meaning it is the source page for which an event occurred, for the event tracking part of the tag.  We’re taking advantage of the fact that this parameter appears on all hits, not just event hits.)

An example of this parameter is: 
WT.es=http://www.yoursitename.com/directory1/directory2/ directory3/filename.aspx

A custom report based on this WT.es parameter gives you a slick view of traffic at every level of your directory structure. Here’s how to set up the dimension.

(First, check to be sure your version of the SDC tag generates WT.es.  It’s somewhat recent.  The TagBuilder tag definitely collects it, and I think one or two earlier versions do also.  Go to this post for info on how to view your tag’s output.)

Report Configuration >> Custom Reports >> Dimensions >> New Dimension

Give it a name, like “Drilldown on Directory Structure (WT.es)” and the column name can be “Path” or whatever you want to call it.

Base it on “Query Parameter” and enter “WT.es” for the parameter name.

Click on the Advanced button and an additional set of choices will appear. All you care about in this extra stuff is the box for “Parameter Contains Drilldown Data.” Check the box and enter “/” for the delimiter. Continue on, taking the defaults from this point, and save the new dimension.  Ta-dah.

Build a custom report with this as the dimension and things like Visits and Views for measures.

Enjoy! When looking at the report, keep in mind that

• this is NOT a path analysis. Just because somebody got to /directory1/directory2/pageABC.html doesn’t mean they went through /directory1/ to get there. Each row of the drilldown report is its own entity, reporting traffic on that particular combination of directories and files.
• blank lines mean “there was nothing at this level”.   Interpret a blank line to be a terminating slash in the URL, with nothing after it.  (Redundancy is good!)
• Filenames will appear in this report as well as directories.  You can detect them by the fact that they have a file extension, like .jsp (assuming your filenames have extensions).  And that there’s nothing under them in the hierarchy.

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