Yet another webTrends7 question

[blueFinger2]

Hey there,

Seems like the further I get into this application the more questions I have.

I'm trying to set up a search engine report. Marketing / Search Engines / Search Engines Dashboard -- currently this is coming up empty. How do I set this up?

I looked around a bit of course, but only came up with a few potential solutions. One--increase the table limiting..why the hell is this set to 0 as default? The other, "add legacy search engine to the table" -- which I can't quite figure out how to do.

Presently when I run that report, I receive an error "Selecting default report. Could not find requested report in template"

Anyone know how to do this?

Mk

[cgrantski]

Grrr, this is a big sore point with me. In the search engine area, WebTrends added capabilities and at the same time made it really confusing.

Would you be happy in the interim with individual reports as opposed to the dashboard? I can help you with that. Go to the WebTrends Knowledge Base and search for the KB article NETIQKB40030.

The KB is at [netiq.com...]

[blueFinger2]

Got it. Thanks CG...is it me, or is this application next to impossible to use? Sure out of the box it spits out numbers, but if you want to get any kind of robust analysis, it's an incredible headache to setup. My temper and patience is quickly dwindling while I'm using this thing. It's not even just that the application is poorly designed from a useability perspective, but also the supporting documentation is incomplete and incorrect.

I just had another issue arise - campaigns. This is the entire reason I bought the software. I needed something to track our advertising efforts. I went through the app again, trying desperately to set it up, and failed once more. I looked to their docuentation and found nothing. I looked online, and retrieved a "how to". I followed it to a "T", but ended up looking for a menu item that didn't exist. I phoned them, and asked what the hell they were talking about in their technote. "Oh, sorry - you don't have that menu item in the Small Business version of WT". K...uhm...THINK YOU COULD STATE THAT IN YOUR DOCUMENTATION!?!? He went on to tell me that campaigns are possible (phew), but you must use the SDC--again, COULD YOU NOT MENTION THAT SOMEWHWERE?

Anyway, just a rant. I will say that the customer support is VERY helpful and friendly.

Anyone try to set up the campaigns feature? Any ideas?

Mk

[cgrantski]

WebTrends has evolved into a professional-level tool in the last couple versions, meaning there's a learning curve. It's worse than it needs to be because of their documentation --- the new features and increased power, of which there is a LOT of both --- are being brought into the product faster than the documentation is keeping up. It's a real sore point with me because, since my employer company does WebTrends consulting as part of its web development business, it takes a bunch longer to get clients to be self-sufficient. To their credit, they (WebTrends) are addressing this internally in a big way right at the moment.

Anyway, about campaigns. It can often be done without SDC for the most part. You have to use preprocessing of the logs to change or add parameters that have the correct pre-defined names. Whether or not you can make this work depends on how your site and campaigns are set up. WebTrends contains a couple of log preprocessing functions and of course there are other methods. If you want to go offline we can talk about site specifics and maybe eventually come back here and summarize the solution for future folks.