Dynamic pages are killing our stats !

[fom2001uk]

I'm about to give up. I've searched everywhere for software to track ASP pages. WebTrends and NetTracker both fail to recognise which page visitors are on. All they record is the numerous session building pages and javascript stylesheets, etc. These are NOT the pages I'm interested in. I want to know what CONTENT they're looking at. Unfortunately the content is buried between layers and layers of intermediate dynamic pages, which completely hide the destination page.

Is there a way out of this, or am I doomed so long as we use ASP ?

Desperately in need of help :-(

[Macguru]

Hi fom2001uk,

Welcome to WmW, You will like this place.

Dynamic pages are probably killing not only your stats, but the whole Web buiseness. If you see "?" or any special caracters in your URLs the handicap is very serious.

You could read your statistics with better numbers with clean URLs.

Try to trim the use of ASP where not necessary. Ask the IT guys to get rid of special caraters in URLs and come up with .htm or .html files.

Stats will be more encouraging then.

[cbg3]

Hello fom2001uk,

Depending on how complicated your query strings are and how many variations you have, you can set up parameters in WebTrends Enterprise Suite to make the query string URLs into "human-readable" pages. For example, the site for which I am webmaster url snipped uses query strings to identify the page being viewed and the language in which the page is being viewed (it is a 10-language site). If someone views a page with the URL http*://www.mysite.com/company/content.asp?intPageID=609&intLangID=10 , the filter I set up in WebTrends showed that the page is the Company Overview page, in Portuguese.

The query string pararmeter parsing is only available in the Enterprise Suite version. Maybe you can get your employer to spring for the upgrade if you don't have it already?

(edited by: mark_roach at 5:23 pm (gmt) on Nov. 15, 2001)

[cyril kearney]

Its fairly common for page counting to be done with a 1x1 pixel that carries page tracking information.

Here's an example:
<IMG SRC="http://mytracker.com/track.asp?u=123456&p=page35" BORDER=0 WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1

The image tag calls a script "track.asp" and passes it a user number "123456" and a page name "page35"

Since you have scripting in ASP it should be a easy task to include this HTML on any page you want to track including whatever page name you want.

[fom2001uk]

Thanks for the replies guys.

As it turns out, Net Tracker DOES handle this by letting you assign content groups at the start. A sort of URL replacement which I think is what WebTrends does (the expensive version !!).

But this one pixel tracking trick seems the way to go. Can you send me the URL of a live example.

Thanks