Managing display of parameters: yes, no, how many

by rocky

You might have followed our advice in the previous topic and turned off Parameter Truncation in the Page File Types screen. And maybe you got a little more than you bargained for. And if you’re using SDC to gather your raw data, you got a LOT more than you bargained for, like about 10 lines too much.

It’s another easy fix. You’ve told WebTrends that you want to display parameters, but you also have to tell it WHICH parameters you want it to display, or else it will display them all.

This involves a different WT feature called URL Rebuilding. If parameter truncation is turned off, URL Rebuilding refines the displayed parameters. If parameter truncation is turned on, URL Rebuilding won’t do a damn thing. URL Rebuilding has to work with untruncated file types. It will not cause parameters to appear for a File Type that is set up to be truncated.

In the Admin console, you’ll find URL Rebuilding under Options. Note that you only get to choose one URL Rebuilding definition per profile, so the one you choose will apply to all untruncated file types.

After thinking about which parameters you truly want to see in your reports, create your own definition following the fairly simple logic in the UI. We won’t go into it here.

Two quirky things about URL Rebuilding are:

1. The good quirky thing is that URL Rebuilding really only affects how things are displayed. The whole entire URL is still there, with all parameters available for filtering and URL Parameter Analysis and custom report dimensions.
2. The bad quirky thing is that URL Rebuilding does NOT apply to your Downloaded Files reports. If you have PDFs for which you want to display some kind of document ID parameters, you can turn off truncation for PDFs (in the Downloaded File Types settings) and there’s only one way to avoid seeing all the parameters.

This would be a job for URL Search & Replace.

Share: