Tracking Image views from Google Images with Webtrends

How is it done?

[zgb999]

With Webtrends Custom Reports it is easy to get a list of all search querries that brought visitors who have used the image search of Google.

As I get more and more referrals from google images I would like to find out which images those people are looking at.

How can I find out which images attract visitors?

[cgrantski]

Hi Beat,

How do these image visits appear in the logs? It's just one hit to an image, right? Does the hit have Google (etc) in the referrer field?

[zgb999]

I checked some entries and they have more than one hit. The Google referrer with all its details is stored in the logfiles. That is where Webtrends gets the keyword from that the searcher used before seeing the picture.

The referrer would be something like
[images.google.com...]

As you can see in this example the page of the content provider is opened when someone is looking at the Google page.

[cgrantski]

If the only hits you're interested in are to images, not pages, you can do this pretty simply, looks like. There are a couple of ways. I think the easiest will be to create a URL Search and Replace operation that will preprocess the logs and change the string ".jpg" to something unique, like ".pic". Then go the the Page File Type Definition function (under Options/Analysis) and create a new page file type, ".pic". Then create a new reporting profile, activate the new URL Search and Replace, and filter out everything except .pic files. Run the analysis, which will only show activity for jpg (now pic) image files. Your referrer report will list the referrers for your images. Most of the referrers will be your own site, but there will be foreign referrers in there. Your top pages report will list the images.

The concept is that WebTrends won't list referrers for anything except pages, so you have to make your images into pages. You don't want to do it globally because it will make a mess of all of your other reports, so this keeps it confined to just one profile.

Here's an even better way if you have access to the custom reports feature (Enterprise) - do the same thing, but make a custom report with 2 dimensions (dimensions = the leftmost column with row labels) - one dimension should be referrer-per-hit, the other should be "page." You can nest them in either direction you want. Then, you'll be able to see the referrers matched up to the individual images.