Forum Moderators: DixonJones
First, a very Merry Christmas to all the WebMasterWorld folks. I hope you're all having a great time with family & friends and that the new year will be very good to everyone!
I'm using WebTrends 7.5b and in my reports I don't always see the page title for every page. There's many page titles there but a significant number of them are just the URL.
Any ideas on how to get it to report all the page titles? Can I force it to look them all up again or do I need to adjust something?
Thanks guys - have a great holiday!
Marvin
You can force WT to take a fresh look. In the WT installation directory find a "titles" folder, find the correct file corresponding to your profile, and delete it. I think the titles folder is in storage/config/wtm_wtx/datfiles.
Remember that doing this will cause WT to hit your site for each distinct URL it finds in the logs. You might want to do it in off-hours.
Also, if your page titles depend on the query string (?param=a has a different title from?param=b) and if WT isn't displaying parameters in the URLs, i.e. the page file type is set to "truncate parameters," then the titles displayed won't make sense. If that's your situation, turn off truncation in the page file types setup.
Looking at the files you mentioned shows both URL's with the title and URL's without. A check of the ones without a title shows they are valid pages with titles. So for some reason it's not getting them all.
I deleted the file for the smallest profile and I'll check again once it's run. I think it might be a problem with WebTrends itself though as it does resolve most of them....
In the distant past WT couldn't figure out dynamically generated page titles, but that's been fixed for a long time, long before 7.x.
Here's another possibility. I'm assuming that your reports don't show parameters for URLs listed. That assumption is the core of my explanation.
If your reports don't show parameters, then hits to pageABC.htm?parameter=A and pageABC.htm?parameter=B will both be combined in the same report line, as plain pageABC.htm with no parameters.
Suppose you have a few pages on your site that really don't have <title> tags. Suppose pageABC.htm?parameter=A does have a <title> but pageABC.htm?parameter=B does not.
When the time comes for WebTrends to display stats for the URL "pageABC.htm" it will go to the page title file and look for the first instance of "pageABC.htm" in any form, with any parameters. The first one it finds, it will use the title associated with it.
If, by chance, "pageABC.htm?parameter=B" is listed before all other variations of pageABC.htm, then its title will be the one chosen for display. If there's no title associated, no title will display in the report. Even though there are many other variations of pageABC.htm that do have titles recorded in the page titles file.
The lines in the page titles file appear in order in which WebTrends first encountered them in the very first log it analyzed during the session in which it fetched page titles. So pageABC.htm?parameter=B being first is a matter of chance.
Maybe this will help explain things, maybe not.
One of the lessons here is to not set WT to truncate parameters, but instead to use non-truncation combined with the selective truncation capability in the URL Rebuilding setting. Complex, yes, but part of WT's powerfulness.
I looked at some reports yesterday and for some reason (perhaps because I deleted the title file?) the vast majority of the pages in the report have the page title.
Maybe that fixed it? I don't know but I'm trying to understand the rest of your post but for reason I can't seem to get my head around it :-0
I might need a few more days to get the holidays out of my system ;-)
Best & Happy New Year!
Marvin
1. Do you have pages where the title is different if just a parameter value is different?
i.e. www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension?parameter=whatever
You have lots of instances of stem.extension, each with a different value for "whatever", and each variation of "whatever" means a different page title?
i.e. www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension?parameter=ABC
title is "Welcome to Product ABC's Page"
www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension?parameter=DEF
title is "Welcome to Product DEF's Page"
If the above is true, go on to question 2. If the above is not true, you can ignore my complicated post.
2. In your Top Pages report, is there a listing for www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension?parameter=ABC and another listing for www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension?parameter=DEF? Or is there just one item in the Top Pages report, "www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension"?
If the answer to #1 is Yes and the answer to #2 is "it appears as www.domain.com/directory/stem.extension", then you have a problem. Otherwise, you can ignore my complicated post!
