Category — Cool Custom Reports

Comparing the behaviors of first-time visitors to veteran visitors can be a real eye-opener. Unless you take a close look at first-time and veteran visitors separately, you won’t know if your site works exquisitely for people who are already familiar with it but is an overwhelming unhelpful mess for newbies. Or the other way around. Happily, WebTrends makes it easy (if you know how) to separate first-timers from experienced visitors.

The length of a visit (in terms of time) is one of the most unsatisfactory web analytics statistics no matter what analytics product you use.

One obvious reason is that you can’t really correlate the length of time with actual visitor attention, even if you do have good numbers about how long the site was on the screen. The less obvious reason is that the numbers just aren’t very good to begin with. But if you really want to know how long people spent on a page for a single page visit, you might want to look at the following “pulse” code.

Suppose somebody on your site searched for something (using on-site search) and then left the site directly from the results page. Wouldn’t you want to know what the search term was? This is a semi-easy custom report that will give you just that — a list of search terms for site search results that were followed by an exit.

Javascript analytics tags like WebTrends’ SDC tags generally don’t track error pages, i.e. 404s (page not found), 500’s (server errors), and so forth. Server log files do. Most people accept the absence of error tracking as one of the tradeoffs of using tagging, outweighed by tagging’s many other advantages.

It’s actually easy to track error pages even if you tag your pages. It’s done by getting your site’s server to return a tagged page whenever one of these client or server errors happens.

Web analytics is all about getting inside the head of the site visitor.  And on-site search is a gold mine of visitor mindset information.
If you are recording on-site search terms at all, then you already have (or can easily make) a report that lists all the search terms people used on your site.   It’s a [...]