webtrends and analytics?

[tonynoriega]

Am i going to be putting too much strain on my server by trying to run both of these tracking applications?

I have my webtrends scripting called via <script src=""></script>
tags before the closing </body> tag in my template, and will be putting the entire google analytics script right below that...

does anyone know if this will cause any errors, conflicts, browser problems...?

just seeing if anyone else is doing this or similar tracking styles on their site..

[cgrantski]

That gets asked a lot and the question is "it depends." Without knowing your server situation, server strain can't be answered. A whole lot of people do it though. The two tags will not conflict with each other although there is a small chance that the first tag will occasionally be loaded and the second tag isn't, if somebody clicks away between loadings. And if your page requires the whole page to load before certain things happen, then the two tags will slow it down more than one tag will. Does that help?

[tonynoriega]

well i guess now that i think about it, the server is quite powerful and shouldnt make a real big dent...

now, what i want to do is keep both tags at the closing </body> tag to allow page loading first and then trigger the scripts...

so no conflicting should happen, BUT the possibility of one loading and one not is possible....

got it.

[harpera]

Depending on your server I would say that you shouldn't have any problems. But am curious as to why you would use to same type of tracking on both the systems. If I remember correctly. Web trends also offers log file analysis. Why not use that for Webtrends and then the javascript method for GA?

That way you could track and compare?

[tonynoriega]

I would, but we have an issue with our CMS application. We use templates to design pages.... and each template contains "areas" for the users to create content in... i.e. center_col, right_nav_col, left_nav_col....etc...

now, when our CMS application opens the visual editor for a user to start creating their content, it adds the HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags... which are already part of the template... so on some pages, i have 3 or 4 HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags.

So i found that each time a viewer would visit a page, it was registered as 4 page views by webtrends reading the log analysis file... so our numbers have been blown out of the water for years.... when the log file was being read, we were averaging 30 MILLION page views per year.... which, obviouisly we had to buy a liscense for...

now that i have installed GA and WebTrends using SDC tags, we are more realisticly down to, maximum, 3-4 million page views per year.... wayyyyyyyyyyy off base...

so yes, i have GA and WebTrends installed, both with JS scripts and the numbers are way more comparable then they used to be... hits, page views and unique visitors are more like 2-3% variation instead of %400 variation...

[cgrantski]

That is a really interesting example of how in analytics you're always hearing something new that can be messed up. There are also CMS's out there that are accidentally inserting multiple tracking codes per served page.