Miscellaneous “candy jar” post #1
This post covers a lot of short WebTrends related questions that jump out at us when we look at our on-site and off-site search reports. The topics range from critical ones like DCS Multitrack and increasing the length of reports to little guys like seeing a # sign in URLs. We’ve also noted some big topics that we’ve put into our backlog of let’s-do-a-whole-post-on-this.
If you did one of these searches and think we misinterpreted what you are after, let us know!
- Chantilly, Virginia, The number one miscellaneous search! — It’s the home base for IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and thus is the geographic location for many IPs that don’t have listings in DNS or GeoTrends. Same for Marina del Rey, California. The state of Virginia is also the home base for AOL’s North American traffic, but the cities vary – Dulles, Manassas, etc. For US sites, Chantilly will almost always be in the top 5 cities and Virginia will likely be the top state.
- Anything having to do with the WebTrends parameter WT.oss — Lots of searches for this one. Check out our on-site search category. We’ll try to do more in this general area.
- Does the parameter have to be WT.oss in order to report on on-site search? — One thing people may not understand is that many on-site search engines already produce a satisfactory equivalent for WT.oss on their results pages (query=, words=, term=, q=) that allows you to adapt any of WT’s prebuilt custom on-site search reports to use the different parameter name.
- What about deleting old log files — The quick answer (in our opinion) is “never.” You can zip them to a tenth their size and store them. If they are server logs, you can first edit out image, css, and js hits then zip them, and their final size will be about one percent of the original. You never know if you’ll need them again.
- In the Pages report, you are seeing pages that do not exist on your site — We can think of two possible answers. If you’re using log files, then somebody could be retyping your URLs or purposely asking for non-existent pages, sometimes for nefarious reasons. If you’re using SDC logs, somebody could have copied your page code to their site without realizing the SDC tag would send signals back to you, with their URLs (and domain names) attached. For the latter, if you don’t have a report on “multi-homed domains” to look at from time to time, make one. Once in a while this becomes a very exciting report!
- Does WebTrends keep track of dynamic pages that have query parameters? — Absolutely yes. You have a lot of ways to get that information. The quickest but possibly messiest is to go to Page File Types and turn OFF the “truncate parameters” setting for your page file type. (To clean up the mess somewhat, investigate the URL Rebuilding function which will allow only your favorite parameters in the reports.) The more roundabout way is to make reports on the values of just those query parameters, one by one. The URL Parameter Analysis settings are a good place to start. If you know Custom Reports, you can make ones for the parameters of interest.
- What’s the difference between a URL Parameter Analysis report and a Custom Report on a parameter? — The subtext for this search is probably “why bother with custom reports on a parameter? URL Parameter Analysis does the same thing and is easier.” There are three main reasons: 1) A custom report can be set up to have more and different measures, 2) A custom report can be placed somewhere logical in your template, close to related reports, while a URL Parameter Analysis report is always stuck in the same section of the template as all other URL Parameter Analysis reports, and 3) URL Parameter Analysis does not work with the ODBC driver and therefore can’t be automatically pulled in to Excel.
- Where is the screen resolution report in WebTrends? — It’s in Site Design >> Browsers and Systems >> Client Details, in the out-of-the-box ”Complete View” template.
- What is a “page view” in WebTrends licensing? — Licensing is based on page view limits. The answer is somewhat complicated and may change so you should ask your account manager for the details and for confirmation of what’s said here. Usually people on this want to know three things: 1) What file types don’t count as pages views? (answer: Images and css files are two main ones. There are others.) 2) Can I cut down on page views by filtering out certain ones? (answer: No, not if WebTrends is doing the filtering. The act of filtering is a page view action if the file is a page type. You can however remove lines from the logs before WebTrends sees them.) 3) If I re-analyze logs, or analyze the same logs in more than one profile, does my license get charged a second time? (answer: No. You can re-analyze the same logs as often as you want without it counting against your license. But don’t alter or move a log because then WebTrends may not be able to tell that it has already analyzed that file.)
- Does WebTrends SDC track off-site links (links that go to other sites)? — Yes, you have to use the Tag Builder’s advanced tag, and set up the tag so it knows what domains to consider “on-site” versus “off-site.” The tag watches for links going to those domains and records clicks on those particular links.
- Does WebTrends SDC track downloads of files that cannot be tagged, such as pdf, doc, txt, wmv, mp3? — Yes. You have to use the Tag Builder’s advanced tag, and set up the tag so it knows what untaggable file extensions it should record as downloads. The tag watches for links going to those kinds of files and records clicks on those particular links.
- Does WebTrends SDC track form button events (submittals of forms)? — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this if your form button uses one of four common submittal actions. This is probably worth a whole post unless WebTrends already has the documentation for it. We haven’t checked.
- Why should I make the advanced tag track form button events (submittals of forms) if I have acknowledgement pages for every form? — Good point. You probably should turn off this part of the tag. The acknowledgement page is usually all you need.
- Does WebTrends SDC track javascript links and events? — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this but you have to be careful about the names and labels in the javascript in order to not end up with gibberish. This is probably worth a whole item unless WebTrends already has the documentation for it.
- Does WebTrends SDC track clicks on links that go from one part of a web page to another (anchor tags, bookmark anchors)? — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this.
- What does it mean when the Pages report shows some URLs with # (pound sign) in them? — They are clicks on an anchor or bookmark link in your page code; see the preceding item.
- How can I remove the # from the URLs in reports? — You can use WebTrends’ URL Search & Replace function to remove the entire anchor name including the #. Or you can change the SDC tag to turn off recording of these.
- Why can’t I find documentation for DCS Multitrack? — Embarrassingly, it actually disappeared from documention some time after May 2006 as far as we can tell. Who knows why. DCS Multitrack is the key to all of the SDC Tag Builder’s advanced tag event tracking, and it’s useful on its own even without the advanced tag, so it really, well REALLY, needs to be documented.
- I am using v. 8.0 and can’t find a link to the Tag Builder. Will the Tag Builder tag work with 8.0? Do I have to upgrade? How do I find the Tag Builder? — All the tag builder does is grab extra analyzable information and puts it into the SDC logs. Pretty much any version of WebTrends can work with those parameters, though not all versions have the right pre-configured reports. You definitely don’t need to upgrade to 8.5 software, though it’s not a bad idea, if you are a software user. You should however (if you host your own SDC) consider upgrading SDC to a recent version, which is 8.0d right now. If you are an On Demand user you already have 8.5 of Analytics and 8.0d of SDC. The general address is http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com. See also this Outsider post.
- What is “the same visit“? — If WebTrends doesn’t see any activity from a visitor’s cookie in 30 minutes, any additional activity won’t be “the same visit.” (30 minutes is the out-of-the-box inactivity time-out length. You can change it to something else and there are good reasons for having it longer.)
- How does WebTrends SDC handle https pages? — The SDC server has to have an SSL certificate and the .gif request in the tag has to be changed from http:// to https://.
- Why doesn’t WebTrends report on time-to-serve? — Probably because your server logs are Apache, which does not record this. IIS does. If you have IIS logs, the time-to-serve stat can be found as the right-most column in the Pages report.
- How can I make the Search Phrases and Keywords Reports show more search terms? — For standard (non-custom) reports you can change the number of displayed rows in any report by going to Web Analysis >> Options >> Analysis >> Table Sizes then changing the “Report Limit.” Note that this will change the limit for all your profiles. For custom reports you can do the same by editing the individual profile and going to Analysis >> Table Sizes then changing the “Report Limit.” There are disk space and performance implications for increasing report table sizes so don’t get carried away.
Those are all the easy-to-answer queries we’ve found in on-site and external search reports for June and July. Phew. That’s a lot of search terms to read through. If we get a good response to this item we’ll try to do it every month. Thanks for all the traffic!
6 comments
A few inputs:
1- Well, I guess they’re neighbors of IANA, which happens to be in Chantilly too!
9- It is my understanding that moving the logs won’t confuse WT. It takes characters at specific places in the log, and as long as the string is in WT memory, it should recognize the log wherever its location, At least this is what I have been told, but we never know
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12- Tech Support told me they didin’t have any documentation about TagBuilder. Everything is under the question marks
1 – Huge omission on my part! Thanks, I will change the text of the post.
9 – I thought so too but found my information quite explicit in the documentation on licensing. Maybe this deserves a test.
18 – The info under the question marks is actually pretty good, but yes, it’s still only viewable under the question marks. I hope that’s because they haven’t yet incorporated it into the pdf-type documentation.
FWIW – One of the summer “Lunch and Learn” series gave the wrong answer to #19…which versions of WT work with the tagbuilder…based on my testing and experience, the answer you gave is correct.
That’s right. They corrected themselves later in the presentation, though, after the main part of the talk. It sounded like they had a slightly different interpretation of “work with” involving some predefined reports in8 .5.
Was there a post created for:
Does WebTrends SDC track form button events (submittals of forms)? — Yes, the Tag Builder’s advanced tag has code to detect this if your form button uses one of four common submittal actions. This is probably worth a whole post unless WebTrends already has the documentation for it. We haven’t checked.
Very good point. We’ve put it on the list! It’s important to know the four types of form submittals that are covered. The TagBuilder itself has succinct, programmer-oriented help screens (they now call them information screens apparently) but I think we could use something that’s for the people who talk to the programmers, i.e. what kinds of form submittal actions don’t get tracked by the tag and what to expect to see in resulting reports. Thanks for the idea, Matt.
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