Tracking only visitors that visited a certain page

How to do a filter that shows only activity of people who are buyers

[zgb999]

We want to see all activity of those people who got to a certain page (e.g. people who subscribed the newsletter, used the contact form or finished the order).

We need a filter that shows only those people in order to see where they came from, what they are interested in...

Using Webtrends Reporting Center we only have 3 types of visit filters:
- entry page
- referrer
- campaign

Did anybody find a way to get a visit filter that filters all people who visited a certain page?

[jaski]

Not sure about extracting it using log analysis packages. But an alternative way to track it is that you can embed a small code snippet in that page which logs these parameters in another text file or database.

in php this code snippet would be some thing like..

<?

$time = @strftime("%a %b %d %I %M %S %p", time()); // server time at the time of hit.

$fp = @fopen("refererlog.txt", "a");
$a = @fputs($fp,$QUERY_STRING."\t"."$REMOTE_ADDR" ."\t" . "$HTTP_REFERER" . "\t" . $time ."\t" . "$PHP_SELF" ."\t". "$HTTP_USER_AGENT" . "\n");
$b = @fclose($fp);
?>

Note: refererlog.txt file must be writable by the webserver .. which means chmod 666 normally.

[zgb999]

Thank you for your answer.

As to my understanding this would only tell me where the visitors came from.

Webtrends gives so many ways to analyse a visitor (where did they come from, what keywords did visitors from search engines use, what pages did they look at, how long did they stay...) it will be difficult to get all this information without a stats software.

Wouldn't it be great to look at only the visitors who bought or ordered something and then look at
- where do most buyers come from
- what are the main interest of people who bought something
- what path do those people take before they order
...

I mean if you have a store it is interesting to know who visited your store but it is even more interesting to know what people who bought at your store did and how you can get more people where those who bought came from giving them more of what seemed to have convinced them to buy.

[cgrantski]

Which version of WebTrends Reporting Center? If your version has custom reports you can create a custom filter within the custom reports section that filters for visits that saw a specified page at any point during the visit. Then you can use that filter to get pages, referrers, whatever for that group of visits. This filter isn't well publicized. I think it's a Visit Filter called "Viewed Page" - just specify the page. Note that this filter is only in the custom reports area; it's not in the main filters section.

[zgb999]

Thank you cgrantski, you are really an expert in this field!

We have Webtrends Reporting Center Enterprise Edition. So custom reports can be done.

What you are saying would mean that it is not possible with Webtrends to define a filter for all reports to monitor clients who ordered something. Instead if I want to track five activities (newsletter ordered, contact form sent, order placed...) and I want to compare visitors who bought something (or used the contact form...) with the visitors who did't then I would have to define 20 reports for each activity which would mean it is necessary to define 100 custom reports!

The filter you mentioned is called "URL viewed in visit" but as mentioned it is only a filter to be used in custom reports.

[cgrantski]

I'm slightly confused here so please confirm that I've got it right. You've got 5 key actions (newsletter, place order, etc) and you'd like to separate people who did each of those actions from those who did not? And you want to look at what other kinds of pages they saw, or how long their visits were, or what referrer they came from (3 visit attributes in this example)? And, of course, it would save a lot of arithmetic if you could also do one report for people who did the events and one for everybody else ("not equal to"). In what I've described here, yes, you'd have to make 5x3x2=30 individual custom reports.

Of course, you also could just create one segment, namely people who did ANY of the key events, resulting in only 3x2=6 custom reports. You'd do this with URL Search and Replace and just change all your key event URLs into one new URL such as "key-event.asp".

First, ZGB, let's both say "hey, at least I can do it even if it's going to be work to set it up. It's so great that the program allows me to do this with mere logfiles, and retrospectively too! Thanks, WebTrends!"

Having said something nice and gotten that part out of the way, please go to the Help>Feedback part of your WT admin to Request A Feature using pretty firm language if you're up for it. The feature would of course be a profile-level Visit filter that does exactly what this custom-report-level visit filter does. WebTrends is actually a rather responsive company (I'll argue with anybody who says otherwise because I have concrete info about it). If you belong to a local user group, see if others want this filter and get them to say something as well.

Alternatively, those of us who understand how valuable this is could get together and commission a pre-processing script.

[zgb999]

Thank you for the feedback!

Yes you got it right. Of course I am happy that you found a way to do the task. Thank you for that!

On the other hand I could not believe that a software that costs $ 12'000 was not able to perform a task that most webtrends users could increase the performance of their website with.

But again, you are right, I am glad I can do it in the way you described it.

If Webtrends is as responsive as you say (without doubting that you had some good experience with them) I wonder why there is no WebtrendsGuy on this forum. This forum is the best thing to get feedback from all over the world for Webtrends they could get...

[cgrantski]

WebTrends has its own user forums and they have webtrendsguys there. But I know what you mean. (You ought to join those forums; you can get to the gateway from their website.)