more Visitors then PV in WebTrends report

[erasa]

Hello,

I'm new here may be one of you can help.

We started a new site with WebTrends7.5b
The prob: in report the number of visitors is larger then thease of PV. so for example yesterday:

Visitors: 541
Pageviews: 370

has anyone a idea?

Thanks you in advance.

[cgrantski]

Hi,

Can you provide more information on exactly what the dimension is based on, and the filters. The Visitors measure is tricky and it's easy to get nonsense results.

[cgrantski]

It's probably because "page views" doesn't measure all the activity on your site. There are other things besides pages. One is downloads. Another is images. If a visit goes directly to a download or an image and never requests an html page file, it will still be a visit, but with no page views.

Check your Accessed File Types report to see all the different types of files that WebTrends found in your logs. Also check your Page File Types setting to be sure that WebTrends is calling all of the correct filetypes "pages." Your site may have a file extension that you want to be counted as pages but that isn't set up for it out of the box.

[erasa]

Hi,

thank you for your answers!

My settings in Webtrends are default.
I have setup some spider filter (about ~120 bots) and my session tracking method is Parameter Match & Cookie ("use entire cookie field")

You wrote:
"...There are other things besides pages. One is downloads. Another is images. If a visit goes directly to a download or an image and never requests an html page file, it will still be a visit, but with no page views."
-> do you have a plan how I can filter such visits?

The site is in php and .php is couted as PV. Any link has his own .php. There are also a lot .js in accessed file types, but I guess this should not be counted as PV.

[cgrantski]

I'd agree, don't count the .js files.

You can filter out images and so forth with a Hit filter. Go to Web Analysis >> Options >> Hit Filters and create an Exclude filter called something like "exclude images", based on URL. In the Page Expression window enter a regular expression for the file types you want to exclude. Separate extensions by a pipe character ¦ which means "or." For the "." use "\."

So, to exlude jpgs gifs js and txt, use this:

\.jpg¦\.gif¦\.txt¦\.js

Be sure to check the Regular Expression box.

That's the easy way to do it. However, note that the act of filtering out all these filter still counts as processing those log file lines, which means those lines will count against your WebTrends license pageview quota. This is a very important thing to keep in mind. You really should remove those lines before WebTrends ever sees them, i.e. make a copy of the log file that has none of these file types in the copies. Then have WebTrends process the copy.

There are a lot of ways to preprocess logs that I won't go into.

[erasa]

hi cgrantski,

Thank you for the tip.
I have filtered it all out (exept htm and php), but the ratio visitors vs PV is still the same. Thats damm strange.

greetings, Ralf

[cgrantski]

Assuming you set up the filter correctly, the only thing remaining (that I can think of) is errors - 400, 500 errors that come from IP addresses that are counted as visitors, but the hits themselves don't count as page views.

I'm assuming you're working with server logs, right?

Then you should look at the Errors (Pages not Found and Server Errors) reports.

[erasa]

Hello cgrantski,

thank you for your tip, yes I'm using server logs.
The error 400-500 was not the reason, but finaly I found it out:
In the session Tracking Cookie field option in WebTRends was "use entiere Cookie field" selected and in the logs where up to 5 cookies signatures in a single row. So WebTrends count any access with mutible cookies as mutible visitors.

I have specified the Cookie field and after a reanalyse the ratio Visitor PV is O.K. again.

[erasa]

Thank you for your tip's cgrantski, it will help me also for other issures!

[cgrantski]

Wow. That's news to me. I've learned something.

[erasa]

so we learnt both a bit :)