Anyone Familiar w/WebTrends?

...and dynamic pages...

[mmiller]

Hi!

I'm wondering if anyone out there is familiar w/WebTrends. I'm using version 7 Enterprise and have most of it up & running.

The problem I'm seeing is that it's not reporting on my forums very well. My forums are in .php and use MySQL for the data (Invision Board).

What WebTrends is doing is just reporting a lot of traffic to forums/index.php and never showing the individual topics that are being accessed. For some reason it's not retrieving the titles of each page in the forums section.

I'm pretty new to this and am not even sure what section of WebTrends addresses this issue. I have checked to see that .php is in the pages list but other then that I don't know what else is required.

Can anyone help me get meaningful reports from my dynamic forums?

Thanks!
Marvin

[nmattheij]

You should be looking at parameters. Invision uses parameters like showtopic and showforum to indicate which page to show.

You can do a parameter analysis, but all you'd get was IDs/numbers (showtopic=1, showtopic=3 and such). You can perhaps use the forum database to translate these ID's into meaningful data. We occasionally create a csv file with IDs and meaningful names.

I advise you to learn about URL parameters and how you can use WebTrends to create useful reports out of highly dynamic pages like the Invision board.

[mmiller]

Hi nmattheij;

Thanks for the reply :-) I'm still a bit lost, let's take it back to basics for a minute (because the docs for WebTrends seems to make things really complex ;-).

The main problem is that it's not reporting the page titles for the forums. I do understand that the forums use dynamic URL's but - looking at the logfile that webtrends is using shows that all the page titles for the forum are included.

So my thinking is that webtrends should just report the pages with titles and popularity like it does with static pages? After all, the data is all there - including the titles.

Am I on glue here? :->

[nmattheij]

I'm not sure I understand "looking at the logfile that webtrends is using shows that all the page titles for the forum are included.".

Do you use the SDC, otherwise I don't understand which logfile you're referring to. WebTrends usually loads page-titles directly from the internet, not from log-files, unless you use the SDC or the Title-querystring.

As far as I know WebTrends reports show URLs, in this case /index.php, and the page-title would probably the first one that is found on your site.

[cgrantski]

It does sound like you're using SDC, as nmattheij says.

At any rate, as long as WebTrends only reports the stem part of the URL, which is WebTrends' default setting, you won't see individual pages whether you are collecting the titles in the logs or not. WebTrends works from the URLs and adds the titles as available. If WebTrends is set to display only the stem and not the parameters, that's all it will display and the existence of titles in the logs won't override that.

So, first of all, change the WebTrends settings so that your php pages are displayed with both the stem (index.php) and the query parameters (all the stuff after the? that is really what identifies individual page instances). You can do this globally or for an individual profile. I assume global is what will be best for you, and it sounds like you've already been to that part of WebTrends - it's in Options >> Analysis >> Page File Types. Edit the php file type and change the setting for "Truncate Query String" to "no." You'll have to reanalyze data to get this change to show in your reports, but I bet you'll be a lot happier.

If you're collecting page titles via SDC (the page titles are the value of a query parameter called WT.ti) I'm not sure whether those titles will automatically show up in reports or not. If not, edit the profile and in the General tab you'll see a check box for HTML titles.

Finally, if you get too many parameters displaying in the reports, you can suppress some of them using the feature called URL Rebuilding, but let's cross that bridge if we come to it.

Hope this helps.

[mmiller]

That's exactly right - I'm using the SDC and client-side tagging to get the data. I apologize for not being specific but I'm not very familiar with this program and have been going through the docs for several days. The net result - I'm hopelessly confused :-)

As you suggested I went back in to the file types for php and reset it to not truncate the url. I changed this setting before but it did not 'take' for some reason. I cleared the cache again and did another analysis and - voila - there are the page titles!

Thank you! I don't know why it wouldn't keep the do not truncate URL setting when I changed it but when you recommended it - it did. It must like you more then me... :->

OK, now that I have the forum pages being displayed I see there's a new issue... How to describe this...

The report is showing separate entries for the same page. Basically it seems like webtrends is using the entire URL (which includes the cookie string) and then deciding that even though 100 people went to the same page, they are all different because the URL contains a cookie which is different?

Does that make sense? It's not showing that the page had 100 visits (so I can gauge the popularity)It's showing 100 separate entries of people going to that page.

BTW, this is an example of the SDC log it's using;

ht*p://www.example.com/forums/index.php?s=LONG NUMBER&showtopic=3508&st=0&WT.tz=1&WT.bh=19&WT.ul
=en-gb&WT.cd=32&WT.sr=1024x768&WT.jo=Yes&WT.ti=
AskMarvin! Forums -> Error 80072efd - Tried But Cant Fix
This?&WT.js=Yes&WT.jv=1.5&WT.sp=@@SPLITVALUE@@&WT.
co_d=84.9.191.42-1379411136.29717959::4C266C6D5F21C6B6D2899F6AD39A722C&WT.
co=Yes&WT.vt_s=1&WT.vt_d=1

[edited by: Receptional at 9:21 pm (utc) on June 21, 2005]

[edited by: Woz at 10:56 pm (utc) on June 21, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified URL / Fixed Scrollism [/edit]

[cgrantski]

I forgot - you have to restart the SQL service to get file types to take, because it involves resetting something in the database. Or whatever.

Since you have an individual identifier in the URL then you do have to use URL Rebuilding after all. It's perfect for this. Go into URL Rebuilding (which is different from URL Search & Replace) and tell it to ignore that parameter. You might want to restart the SQL service just in case.

[mmiller]

Thank you guys for your great help!

I'm going to sit down today and see if I can get the URL rebuilding working. Knowing what area of the program to concentrate on makes it a lot easier :-)

Best & Thanks;
Marvin