How to display any KPI page as a measure column
Applies to: SDC (our subsequent post discusses server log files)
You know how orders and revenue show up in their own columns in WebTrends’ e-commerce reports?
You can get the same thing for any page or group of pages, not just orders.
Such as, a form. All forms (as a group). Each separate page in the checkout process. The acknowledgement page that happens after a form is submitted. A particular download. A promotionally-oriented page. The FAQ. The site map page. A particular folder or section of your site. In other words, anything you think is important and that you want to quantify for different visit segments.
You can use these columns (”measures”) in a custom report where the dimension (rows) is something like:
- a list of campaigns
- a list of search terms
- a list of visits coming from affiliate sites
- visits coming from search terms that are brand words
- first time and/or returning visitors
- 1st visits, 2nd visits, 3rd visits, 10th visits, whatever
And, by using the calculated measures feature, your custom reports can also have conversion rates from form view to form submission, or percentage of all visits that had a certain KPI page. Remember, Webtrends allows 20 measure columns per custom report, so you can cram in a lot of great stuff.
The report segment below shows where we used this trick to show campaign results for six campaigns (six rows), showing campaign results in terms of: visits that contained an application form, visits that contained the acknowledgement page after the application is submitted, and a couple of calculated conversion rates.
Not having this capability has been a source of frustration for some WebTrends users, because WebTrends doesn’t do this out of the box. But if you use SDC, you can do it by hijacking one of the SDC parameters, as described below. Although we’re not happy that it’s not right up front in the GUI and has to be done with a trick, we are still very positive about the fact that WebTrends has provided the raw materials and the flexibility to do this, period.
Someday WebTrends may add this kind of thing to its out-of-the-box user interface. It’s that useful.
Here’s how to do it.
Create a custom measure to show VISITS to the KPI page/group
Decide what page(s) (downloads, etc) you want to act as your KPI event(s). As an example, it could be the page /apply/thankyou.aspx, which is the page seen after an application is submitted.
Open the WT admin screen and go to:
Report Configuration >> Custom Reports >> Measures >> New Measure
- Give the measure a name that includes the word “visits” because this is going to be the visits version of the measure. Same for the “column name.” (Example: “Visits with Submitted Applications”)
- “Value to Base On” is Query Parameter and “Parameter Name” is WT.ti. (it could be ANY parameter with a text value; we chose WT.ti. This is what we’re calling “hijacking.”)
- “When to Measure” is “Hits that Match Specified URL.” It’s the last choice in the dropdown menu that has “All Hits” as the top choice.
- For “Do you want to sum this measure across the visit” choose “YES.”
- In the “URL Expression” window, fill in your KPI URL or regex string, following the same process you’d use if you were defining a Content Group. For our example, this is where you’d enter “/apply/thankyou.aspx”. Check the Regular Expression box if appropropriate.
- In the currency window, choose “No Currency” but set the decimal places to 0.
Create a custom measure to show VIEWS of the KPI page/group
This is the same process as above with two differences, indicated by boldface. The name is of course different, and “Sum Across The Visit” becomes “No.” You can create a new measure from scratch or just clone the one you made in the previous step and make the needed changes.
Decide what page(s) (downloads, etc) you want to act as your KPI event(s). As an example, it could be the page /apply/thankyou.aspx.
Open the WT admin screen and go to
Report Configuration >> Custom Reports >> Measures >> New Measure
- Give the measure a name that includes the word “views” because this is going to be the views version of the measure. Same for the “column name.” (Example: “Application-Thankyou Views“)
- “Value to Base On” is Query Parameter and “Parameter Name” is WT.ti. (it could be ANY parameter with a text value; we chose WT.ti)
- “When to Measure” is “Hits that Match Specified URL.” It’s the last choice in the dropdown menu that has “All Hits” as the top choice.
- For “Do you want to sum this measure across the visit” choose “NO.”
- In the “URL Expression” window, fill in your KPI URL or regex string, following the same process you’d use if you were defining a Content Group. For our example, this is where you’d enter “/apply/thankyou.aspx”. Check the Regular Expression box if appropropriate.
- In the currency window, choose “No Currency” but set the decimal places to 0.
Use the measure in a custom report
Follow the usual steps for adding a measure to a custom report. You’ll see your new measures in the dropdown list of available measures.
In the Measures screen, after you’ve chosen the measure from the dropdown list, you’ll see a little box where you choose “Method” (usually says “SUM”). Set it to COUNT. This is important.
Attach it to a profile and analyze.
Postscript 1: If you use this in the “visit” version, use it with a dimension that does not change during a visit. Your stats, if in the “visit” form, get a little crazy if you use a dimension that changes constantly during a visit.
Postscript 2: This doesn’t get into Visitor History, at least not in its present form. We’re working on that.
16 comments
Nirvana. I’ve only dreamed of doing this type of reporting. I’m glad you guys use your spare time more wisely than me!
I’m super-interested in doing this with logfiles, so please don’t forget to circle back on this topic! Thanks for a great post!
This is yet another great example of utilizing custom measures based upon Query parameters. That said, your two custom measure examples confuse me. If I sum across the visit, doesn’t that count as a VIEW (Count=1 for each hit), and if I DO NOT sum across the visit (Count=1 and not repeated) doesn’t that provide the Visit.
Mitchell, look for the logfile answer in the next couple days. It involves a 1-line CDT script that inserts a parameter into every log file line during processing. A text parameter is all you need to do this, and log files don’t always have that parameter, so the CDT script makes sure it is there.
CDT script = no-longer-supported-but-still-working-perfectly WebTrends scripting language.
Bosilytics – I agree that it’s confusing, but it’s correct. YES gives you visits. NO gives you hits.
The difference is that the method is COUNT. If you say “Yes” to sum-across-visits, all the PV are lumped into one number, like 5. And COUNT sees a count of “1″, i.e. one number for that visit.
If you say “No” to sum-across-visits, all the PVs stay distinct. And COUNT sees all the individual PVs.
It took a while for us to figure out how these interact and get to this method.
This is amazing. It has been there all the time in plain sight. Did you get this from WebTrends Professional Services?
No, we figured it out ourselves. We’ve found out since then that WebTrends Professional Services has known how to do this for a while, but I guess it’s not their job to share great tricks with non-PS customers.
This is basically the same as Omniture’s Success Events, or conversion variables isn’t it? Only it looks like they can be applied to more situations in WebTrends than in Site Catalyst and also applied after the original reporting setup. Am I right?
Matt K – You’ve hit the nail on the head. It was Omniture’s Success Events that inspired us to look back at the custom measure functionality to see if we could re-create the concept with WebTrends.
As always, just make sure any dimensions you choose for these reports are visit based. If you try incorporating a hit based dimension you will end up either disappointed, confused or both.
And once again you guys rock the house in testing! That said, since I am sure you are one up on me here … This is empirically different from the Scenario Steps as a measure huh? Those were always visit based and were limited to the first or last step. This is GREAT!
Man, I swear you guys are sitting behind me. A lot of recent posts were things we were just trudging through.
Measures.. ahh measures, easily one of the top worst documented features within WT. If there is even anything written about them, they sure as hell don’t make sense.
Thanks for the tip on the WT.ti for tracking pages.. we were so deep into using parameters for everything we even used search and replace to have pages throw made up ones. It worked the same way, but it was tedious.
It’s great for things you can’t get tracking into right away, but these types of reports really shine if you get things tracked with lots of parameters/values. It becomes even cooler when you pick out bits of text from a long custom parameter using regEx. These types of reports are very powerful indeed, it’s just a shame you have to become insane to even think of using them in the first place, and then go madder trying to get them to work.
Well put!
Hey, if you have anything cool you’ve discovered, or good examples of something that shines that would fire somebody’s imagination, let us know or blog it or something! That’s what we’re about — trying to get the advanced people to move the middle people along, faster than we ourselves were able to move when we were middle users. Without the insanity party, if possible.
Unbelievably great and overdue. I’ve heard that WT has been doing this internally since last year. Why did it take so long for them to figure it out? And why didn’t they tell everybody? Thank you VERY MUCH.
thank you for your wonderful web site. I liked it very, very much.
Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.
Is there a way to build a custom measure for “time spent” in the KPI group?
No. That would be fantastic – a “time spent” measure for content groups. That would be a really really helpful KPI. As far as I can tell, the underlying structure of WebTrends analyzed data is either per page or per visit. When you try to get this to work for a content group, the statistic you get equates to whole visit length, for the visit that contained the content group.
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