Comments on: Version 8.5 Analytics software released

By: rocky

rocky — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:14:05 +0000

Falk – good question. We have a new post related to this: http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2008/tracking-the-time-spent-by-single-page-visits/

By: Falk

Falk — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:56:58 +0000

I am missing another information and I wonder whether it isn´t available at all or whether I haven´t figured the “how to”:
can you create a column identifiying “short visits” (e.g. providing the percentage of all visits shorter than 10 seconds)?
I´m painfully missing this measure…

By: Jacques Warren

Jacques Warren — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:35:43 +0000

No Bounce Rate??? Whaaaat?? Is it me or the people in Portland are not listening to the market?? Too bad then. Darn too bad…

Good question. I beleive they were, but I am not sure. Again today, while giving training, I could verify the case with IANA and ARIN as well with Canadian ISPs showing as coming from thoses organizations. This makes the “US Traffic” very unreliable for Canadian sites…

By: rocky

rocky — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:21:05 +0000

Hi Jacques,

No. No bounce rate. And we haven’t been able to design a custom report that would have, for a given URL, both the number of views or entries and the number of single page visits or exits. Any two of those in the same report would give us something to work with.

The Chantilly and Marina Del Rey problems are difficult because AOL is also in Chantilly and Reston, and ARIN is in Chantilly, and IANA is ….

Anyway. Aargh.

When you were talking to tech support about this, were you both using the same GeoTrends version?

By: Jacques Warren

Jacques Warren — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:39:52 +0000

Hi Rocky,

Quick question: is Bounce Rate included now, or is it one of the calculated measures (i.e. still needs to be configured)? I have begged WebTrends to make it a fully integrated part of the reports, as it is in Google Analytics, for years now.

I am curious to know what is the problem you refer to when you mention Chantilly and Marina Del Rey. Here, in Canada, what I noticed about 2 years ago was a problem regarding Chantilly, more precisely the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). I had noticed that, although a visit was said to be coming from that organisation, a DNS resolution was giving ISPs from Canada under IANA, making that traffic appear as coming from the USA whereas it was in fact coming from Canada. I have seen that over and over since then, to the point that I always warn my Canadian clients to be careful before they conclude they get so % of visits from the USA. In one particular case, they thought they were getting 15% of the visits from the US, when in fact, after factoring the IANA problem, it was only 3%.

At that time, I called the IANA, in Chantilly, and asked why many visits from Canadian ISPs were showing under their name (and thus from Chantilly, Virginia). They said that if an ISP didn’t change the default contact information when purchasing new IP addresses, the IP would still officially appear as belonging to IANA in some database. Now, add to this that IANA is operated by the ICANN, and you get your Marina Del Rey traffic as well.

Anyway, I don’t know to what extend all this is reliable, but that’s my story so far. I have seen many times WebTrends reports, “Organizations”, showing IANA, and then Canadian ISPs under its name (rogers.com, bell.ca, mc.videotron.com). Very strangely, however, WebTrends tech support could never reproduce the problem…