Cool custom report: Investigating visits with zero page views
(Applies to: server logs)
Your Visits by Pages Viewed report shows quite a few visits of length O, i.e. zero pages viewed. Or, you have a custom report with a Pages dimension where there’s a row called “None”, showing something in the Visits column but 0 in the Views column. How can this be?
Well, it’s likely that somebody’s requesting an image or download without actually requesting a page. They’re probably doing it through a link from another site that goes directly to the image or download. This can happen on any site, but you’ll only notice it if you’re analyzing server log data, not SDC data.
Remember, in WebTrends a “page” is something very, very specific — it’s a file type that is turned on in the “Page File Types” settings. Out of the box, WebTrends defines many many file types as Pages (html, htm, jsp, asp, etc) but many other file types are not on the list (pdf, jpg, gif, doc). So, any requests for non-page-defined files are recorded as activity, but not as Page Views.
And a “visit” in WebTrends is “a series of file requests without a pause longer than 30 minutes.”
You can find out more with a custom report or two. Just create a filter for “visits of length 0″ and use dimensions like Referring Page (to see exactly where those links are) or Entry Request or URL (to see what they’re requesting). Or live large and make a 2D report: URL and Referring Page.
The Custom Report filter for “visits of length 0 page views” is this:
- Type of Filter: Visit
- Match Criteria: Visit Page Views (down at the bottom of the list)
- Match Value: Equal to 0
- Comparison Method: Numeric
5 comments
I found out that many of these zero page visits were because of our email campaigns. The email content was coming from the website image folder. So, each time an email was opened by a customer, we had a zero page visit (unless the customer clicked through from the email to our site!). I even started doing a little conversion calculation to monitor conversion based upon removing zero page visits which made it easier to focus on who was actually buying, instead of worrying about transient /casual visits.
Another possible dimension to try would be Entry Request, which will display the first request – whether a page or not.
Good point, thanks! I’ll change the main text of the post.
We generate webtrends report for Parent-Child profiles, and we have separate reports for the links of the HTML pages accessed for each of the child profiles.
The template has a custom report . The Dimension is ‘Pages’ , and we have measures for Page Views and Visits. We get a NONE dimension for each report and it is the one that has the highest number of PageViews, but has 0 visits.
I understand that checking the ‘ exclude activity without dimension data’ will eliminate the NONE. But my client wants to know what the NONE represents?
From my analysis I assumed that the NONE gets registered when a page is left Idle without activity without performing any activity on it. But I am not able to find a sure reason.
We are using Server Log files, and also the default global settings for the “Page File Types”.
However, my concern is if I open a page and keep it idle for a while then a visit to the page and also to a None Page is getting logged, even though I do not download anything or click any link from that page.
ALso, the resources on the pages are not being accessed from any source outside of our domain.
Please respond as soon as possible with a suggestion.This is a bit urgent for us.
The probability is extremely high that this is exactly what’s described in the article – non-page files being requested, without an accompanying page file. If you add the measure “hits” to your report, you’ll get a better idea of what WebTrends is finding. “Hits” are any file request, whether defined as a page or not. You’ll almost certainly be seeing activity in the Hits column for those visits that seem to have zero page views.
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