Seven ways to annotate your reporting

by rocky

There are days when I think the best possible thing I could do for end users of web analytics reports would be to give them more and better … explanations. NOT more data, but good clear labels, descriptions, and, well, explanations.

Here are several ways you can help end users by adding or modifying language in WebTrends reports. I’m mostly talking about v8.5, though most of it applies to earlier versions.

Profile name — When in the profile editing mode, this is the first field in Analysis >> General. You’re already using it, without doubt. What you enter here will appear on the list of profiles and at the top of every report (in 8.5 it’s in in uselessly tiny type just below the uselessly huge “Analytics Reports” headline; in 8.0 and 8.1 it was reasonably sized and boldface). The name field can accept a lot of characters and it will wrap, in the list of profiles. But when displayed at the top of a report it gets truncated to about 50 characters, so you might want to consider this your limit.

Profile title — Uh, didn’t we just deal with this? No. That was the profile name, this is the profile title. Confusing, yes, and you can ignore this section if you wish. But have you ever noticed the tab “Reports” which contains a subtab “Report Header”? On that page, there’s a “Title” field that accepts about 50 characters. (Hello WebTrends people, this field is broken in 8.5, and what you enter in this field doesn’t show up anywhere.) In 8.0 and 8.1, however, if populated, this field supersedes the Profile Name when you’re looking at report results. (Hello WebTrends people, the screen says it defaults to the Profile Description, which is wrong – it defaults to the Profile Name.) Anyway, when working properly as it does in 8.0 and 8.1, using this field simply means you can have a profile appear as one name in your list of profiles and as another friendlier name for those looking at the report results. Not many people would care, but I do, and I’d like to see it fixed in 8.5.

Profile description — Another little-known field, but this one actually works. It’s the second field in Reports >> Report Header (the messed-up one in the previous paragraph is the first field). Profile Description accepts 255 characters (too few for the important job of explaining what specialized profiles do!). What you enter in this field appears in tiny type in a crowded spot below the profile name.

Okay, I’ll be nicer to WebTrends for the rest of this post.

Custom Report name and title — If you make custom reports, you’ve done this. Looks like the limit is about 135 characters.

If you want the report name to appear in the Table of Contents without wrapping, you need to limit it to about 25 characters.
And, very important for ODBC users among us, too-long custom report names/titles can kill the ODBC connection. The limit for ODBC seems to be about 70 characters.)

Custom Report description — When you create a custom report, this is the golden opportunity to tell your readers what the report is about, how to use it, maybe something about threshholds or interpretation. You have a LOT of room – at least 1500 characters, maybe more. And, new to 8.5 apparently, line breaks you put in your text are preserved!

Custom Report Help Card text — Did you know you can affect what shows in the Help Cards that appear below the report tables? You have opportunities to insert your own text whenever you define a custom report, dimension, measure, or filter, and it’s always offered to you as the last field box in the definition screens. If you do a lot of custom report work, using the Help Cards can help your users and SYA later on when you’ve forgotten exactly what went into those components.

Standard Report description — Warning … this is a hack. The GUI doesn’t allow you to edit standard reports (such as the Pages report or the Browsers report) but if you are lucky enough to be using the software version of WebTrends, you can go through the back door.

No, WebTrends does not support what I’m about to tell you …

There is a language configuration file for the interface wording. With a text editor (and proper use of backups and carefulness) you can edit reporting text. The file is called english.rpl (there are also versions for other languages) and it’s in the /wtm_wtx/template/ folder in the WebTrends installation.

Here’s an example line from this file:

<TopPages_ShortDescription> = {{This identifies the most popular web pages on your site and shows you the number of visits for each, and displays the average length of time the page was viewed.}}

So maybe you think the word “popular” is dumb and you don’t want all the “you/your” stuff. And you’d also like to clarify the measures. You could change it to:

<TopPages_ShortDescription> = {{This identifies the most-visited web pages on the site. The table shows the number of visits for each page (regardless of how many times the page was seen in a given visit) and the average length of time the page was displayed (but only for those page views that were followed by another page view). Note that we have decided to count any click within a Flash application as a “page.” }}

I know we all think we could explain reports to our end users better than WebTrends can, so you’re probably really tempted to give it a try.

Some tips:

Make sure WebTrends isn’t processing anything when you change this file. (Actually, I violate this rule all the time because the text editor I use, TextPad, allows editing of a file without locking out the program. Knock on wood.)
Use TextPad (or another safe text editor, not Notepad, definitely not Word) to open the file.
Look around the file carefully before you make changes, to get accustomed to what’s there.
In our experience, you can safely make changes to anything inside double curly brackets i.e. {{ … }}.
Do NOT make changes to anything inside double percents i.e. %% … %% even if the percented strings are inside double curly brackets {{ … }} !
Do NOT make changes to anything inside angle brackets < … >
I strongly suggest limiting your changes to the ShortDescription lines. You’ll get the most bang for the buck without getting into too many interdependencies. But, hey, it’s all at your own risk.
Don’t get carried away with length. You probably could break something if you make strings too long. (If you learn anything about limits, please tell us)
Make a backup of the file before changing it.
When done, reboot WebTrends or restart the services to get the changes to take effect.

Final thoughts

This post doesn’t talk much about names and labels, especially for content groups, column headings in custom reports, and so on. Let it simply be said that you have a lot of opportunity for helping end users by being careful with these.

And, before you ask, WebTrends sadly doesn’t have a way to add report annotations on the fly, for example by end users when they are looking at report results. Nor does WebTrends allow any annotations of graphs. Maybe some day.

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