Five ways WebTrends can change how a page appears in reports

by rocky

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 others, like the Paths reports) display only the filename. When not truncated, ALL parameters get displayed. (This can be a horrible sight and you can get it under control using #2 below.)
URL Rebuilding — When parameters are NOT truncated (see #1), this feature allows you to specify which parameters you want to appear or be hidden.
URL Search & Replace (find it in the Report Configuration area) — this allows limited edits of the URL and query parameters.
The site’s domain — Normally, each page’s domain will be displayed according to what’s in the Domain or Host field of the log for each page hit. If the Domain isn’t in the logs (for example is not being logged at all) or if you have set WebTrends to Override MultiHome, then you can control the domain name part of the URL. WebTrends will use the domain name you enter in the Web Site URL field of the Home tab.
The home page filename — WebTrends wants to change all instances of your home page filename to a plain slash (/). It will do so if you disclose the name of your home page file, in the Home Page File Names field of the Home tab. There’s actually a decent reason for this, having to do with the fact that both “/” and “/default.asp” are, really, the home page and it would be nice to aggregate their stats. If you don’t want this to happen, leave that field empty or put a nonsense filename in there.

Here’s an important distinction. Some of the things on the list just suppress data in the displayed reports without actually removing the data from the back room or affecting analysis. #1 and #2 for example don’t actually remove parameters from the analysis. They are still there to be used as filter definitions or custom report dimensions or URL Parameter Analysis reports. #1 and #2 just cause changes in how results are displayed in certain reports, specifically the Page reports, Paths reports, and so on. Likewise, #5 just affects the display in those reports.

Others on the above list do affect the analysis. If you alter a URL or parameter using URL Search & Replace, it’s altered for the entire analysis, and the entire profile. If you suppress the domain name in the logs using Override MultiHome, you lose the ability to filter on domain name.

Share: