Cool custom dimension: IP addresses
First, here’s the obligatory gripe. How is it that WebTrends doesn’t offer IP address as a dimension??? What’s up with that?
Second, here’s the obligatory Outsider solution. Make your own IP address dimension, of course! It’s better than the Visitors report because this version will combine into one row all the visitors that have an IP address in common.
Instead of this:
You can have this:
This custom dimension works great if:
- you are sessionizing based on the SDC cookie(s). Your Visitors report will show people as something like “63.15.208.255-7203986748993″ if they have a cookie and “72.181.194.189_Mozilla/5.0….” if they don’t. Note that these visitor identifiers are the IP address, followed by a hyphen or an underscore, followed by other stuff. That consistency – the IP address coming first – is the key to an easy extraction.
- you are sessioning based on IP/User Agent. Same thing happens there, the Visitors show as IP_stuff.
If you are sessionizing based on a non-SDC cookie, you’ll have to check your Visitors report to see whether the cookie values contain the IP address, and adapt the method shown here.
Steps to create this custom dimension:
1. Create a custom dimension within the Custom Reports area. Name it.
I call mine “IP address from cookie” because I’m usually working with reports that are sessionizing based on cookie. If your sessionizing is based on IP/UA, then it would be correct to call it “IP address.” Why does the distinction matter? If you’re pulling the IP from the cookie, the IP address in the cookie will be the IP address of the user at the time the cookie was originally set, i.e. their first hit of their first visit. If they have a laptop and are visiting from a different address, WebTrends will still just have the IP that’s in the cookie. Unless, of course, for this purpose you create a profile that sessionizes on IP/UA just for the purpose of using this cool custom dimension.
2. In the next screen, base the dimension on Visitor then click on the Advanced button. The screen will refresh with all the Advanced options. What you want to do is extract the cookie value from the Visitor info. So, …
3. Click the Regular Expression choice, and in the regex box enter this:
^([^-_]*)
That’s hat-parenthesis-bracket-hat-hyphen-underscore-bracket-star-parenthesis. It’s a cute succinct regex using parentheses to denote an extraction of everything up to the first hyphen or underscore character.
4. Save.
5. Create a custom report with this dimension and whatever measures you fancy, such as visits and page views.
I always turn on “use interval data” for both visits and pageviews measures because I want to look for spikes in trend graphs in the final report.
Thank you to “SunnyG”on the WT user forum for giving me the idea for this post.
6 comments
Rocky,
Good post but what are the privacy implications. There has been a lot said in the EU about the EU directive and the use of cookies and tracking for personally identifiable information.
There are also queries regarding those ondemand customers were legal would literally scream blue murder because such information is held in the Oregan data centres.
What are your thoughts regarding that?
Other than that I can honestly see the value and will be playing around with it in my software solution this afternoon. Benefits for customers / clients would be a truer reflection on customer usage. If this could also be tied in with a customer id you will be able to see average device to user ratios and frequency thus target more mobile customers with properly formatted ads, qa codes or texts.
Miles
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Miles Bennett, Michael Diederich. Michael Diederich said: Cool custom dimension: IP addresses http://bit.ly/4P6GtC webtrends-outsider is back
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Hi Miles,
This way of looking at “visitors” is actually more private than the WebTrends Visitors report. The key is the phrase “personally identifiable information.” A whole cookie value (IP plus unique visitor ID) is personally identifiable if I find out what company owns that IP, go to that company’s office, and look at individual computers’ cookie files to see which computer has that exact cookie. Then, assuming that the person normally sits at that computer is the person who did the browsing, I will be able to say who that person is. Or, alternatively, if the IP address belongs to an ISP such as Comcast.net, I could hope the person had arranged with Comcast to have a permanent, fixed IP. If they do, I could maybe get a court order to attempt to force Comcast to tell me the mailing address and name that are attached to that account. If the person doesn’t have a fixed-IP address arrangement with Comcast, I’d only know, with GeoTrends for example, the approximate geo location served by that particular Comcast proxy.
With just IP addresses as described in this Cool Dimension, the best I could know would be what company they worked for or what ISP they use, plus maybe a GeoTrends location. If five people visited the site from that IP address (i.e. that company), I wouldn’t know who was who.
I once worked at a company where every employee’s computer had a unique IP address but that was long ago. The usual way companies handle it now is giving every employee a unique internal IP address (within the network, starting with 172. or 192. or 10.) but, when the employees browse to outside the intranet, they go through one or more public IP addresses. Hundreds of employees would all be using that same external-facing IP.
I think cookies intrude into privacy if they contain a person’s name or email address that was collected (in a web form filled out by the visitor) when the cookie was set. I’ve seen such cookies, but the SDC cookie is definitely not one of them.
Tying the cookie to a specific customer ID, as you mentioned, is a big problem if you have a lookup table in-house, maybe a CRM, that in turn ties customer IDs to customer names. The customer name is the thing that has to be protected at all costs.
Er, excuse me, I shouldn’t have said this is a way of looking at “visitors.” It’s a way of aggregating visitors into IP addresses, and the “visitors” concept doesn’t apply, it’s measuring visit.
Awesome – where have you guys been lately? Happy New Year!
Yeah, where have you been? I went to WebTrends training while you were gone and it taught me enough to appreciate that the topics on the WEbtrends Outsider are da bomb. Will you be at Engage?
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