The Referring Pages report – Getting the URL Parameters to Show Up
Applies to: Software
The Problem
The Referring Pages report, as it comes out of the box, can be a bit of a disappointment.
What most of us would like to have is a list of clickable URLs that will take us to the referring page so we can see the context, i.e. the exact page on which the link to our site is being displayed.
Well, the URLs in the Referring Pages report are in fact clickable, but much of the time they won’t go to the correct page on the other site. This is because the Referring Pages report strips off query parameters.
So if you see a lot of traffic to your new product’s page coming from www.reviews.com/products/review.cfm, you won’t be able to find the review that links to your site, if the complete page URL is actually
/review.cfm?review=283999.
The Solution
If you have software, you can add a line to one of your configuration files that will make parameters show up in the Referring Pages report. The line will change how much the referring page’s query string will be truncated.
The line goes into the [profile] section of the config file and is:
referrerquerytruncatelength = xxxxx
where “xxxxx” is the number of characters you want displayed. I don’t know if there’s an upper limit. I use 45 which is long enough for most cases. A value of zero will of course result in complete suppression of the URL parameters.
The Details
You can make this change in either of two configuration files. You can set it up to apply to all profiles by changing the global configuration file, or you can make it happen only in selected profiles.
- To make the change in all your profiles, add the above line to the following file. It’s in your WebTrends installation folder:
/storage/config/wtm_wtx/wtm_wtx.ini
- To make the change in just a selected profile(s), locate and modify the *.wlp file for your selected profile in this directory:
/storage/config/wtm_wtx/datfiles/profiles/
(The name of the profile file you want to edit will be <GUID>.wlp where <GUID> is the long string that appears in the Profile File Name box, in the first screen you see when you edit a profile. An example is “ER53ShxcFK6″ which would have a configuration file named ER53ShxcFK6.wlp in the /datfiles/profiles/ folder.)
5 comments
[...] There are two parts to this. First, you have to enable the display of referring page query parameters. This is a simple hack to a config file (if you use the WebTrends software). The hack is described in this post: http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2010/the-referring-pages-report-getting-the-parameters-to-show-up/ [...]
Hi,
Do you know if is possible to see the connection between af specific page on your web site and the referring page report?
E.g. I have a product page and I would like to know the referring trafic to this specific page. Can you find this answer within one of the standard reports or would it require at custom report?
/Lars
Lars – No, it would be a custom report, but a very easy one. You’d either have to create a filter that includes only hits to that particular page and then apply that filter to a report that lists referring pages, or you could get a big nested table that lists all your pages and, for each one, the various referring pages that brought traffic to it. For the big table, set your primary dimension to “pages” and your secondary dimension to “referring pages.”
Hi,
Is the above solution possible for Ondemand too?
Thanks,
PT
Good question. Ask the tech support people for On Demand. If you find out, please come back here and reveal the answer?
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