Reducing page views

[u2ill]

I've decided to use WebTrends supplied through our ISP for traffic analysis on our website. The ISP charges a monthly rate for the WebTrends service based on the number of monthly page views our site recieves. On our homepage, I'm embedding a SWF file. After looking at the logs, I've noticed that the SWF is considered an additional page view. So everytime someone goes to the most frequently visited page on the site, it counts as two page views. If I can get around that (having it only count as one) then I will be in the next lower pricing catagory from my ISP.

So the question is: is there anyway to embed content such as Flash without it counting as an additional page view?

[john_k]

First, that seems like an odd way to charge for a standard service. If they need to charge you separately for a log analysis tool, they should just charge a flat rate, or base it on your bandwidth usage.

Anyway, to your question: If you are able to configure the WebTrends setup yourself, you can specify that .swf files (and any other extension) not be included in your stats. The files will still be in the raw log files, but WebTrends will ignore them when it processes the log file.

[u2ill]

The problem is that the ISP prices by whatever WebTrends says the page views are, without any filters. So I need to do something on the Apache side of the house. Is there a way I can exclude certain pages from the Apache logs?

[cgrantski]

This WebTrends product is analyzing your log files right? It isn't, by any chance, the WebTrends product that uses js-tagged site pages? It would probably be too obvious for the solution to be removing the tags from the extraneous pages ...

If it's analyzing log files, maybe Apache has a way to turn off logging for the /swf/ directory assuming there is one.

[wkitty42]

having played with webtrends, seems to me that the swf files are configured in the webtrends setup as seperate pages just like html, php, css, asp, jsp, etc pages are... they would have to change the config of webtrends and either remove or adjust the swf files so that they are not counted as seperate pages if they are within an existing document...

the only other option i can think of is to move the swf file(s) to another server and pull them from there instead of from this ISP who is counting them as page views...

[Receptional]

the only other option i can think of is to move the swf file(s) to another server and pull them from there instead of from this ISP who is counting them as page views...

But this would probably cost more than paying...

I agree that this is an unusual way to charge for Webtrends. Webtrends LIVE I would understand, but doesn't sound like you do have webtrends live.

I don't know if it is the same as the days when I had a site on an ISP offering Webtrends, but I would have thought you could ask you ISP to switch off all extrenuous file extensions. It may well be that they are aiming to charge you for every hit - so check the gifs and jpgs as well.

Then again - maybe it is just worth paying the extra 10 bucks - You can't get too much information about your visitors IMHO.

Dixon.