WebTrends - How to get Search Engine information?

I've got a fully working WebTrends install...except no Search Engine stats

[MikeKent]

Hi all,

Hoping to pick your collective brains.

I'm running WebTrends 7 Small Business and have it largely configured as I like. Except, I've just noticed that the Search Engine Dashboard shows nothing.

I get the header and "This dashboard summarizes...etc" as normal but followed immediatly by "This report was created on...etc" which I would expect to be at the bottom of the page after the actual report.

Any thought on what I need to do to enable it? Thanks!

[cgrantski]

Hi, the source of your problem is a lack of clarity by WebTrends. You can get the reports you need via some of WT's preconfigured custom reports. WebTrends has unfortunately skewed their out-of-the-box reports toward users of its SDC data collection technology. Rather than go into an explanation here, I'll refer you to some sources that have dealt with this quite a few times (because it seems like all of us WebTrends users ask this same question at the beginning!).

First, go to the support area of www.webtrends.com and get into the Knowledge Base and do a search on "search engine dashboard".

Second, also in the support area, join the user forums. This SE dashboard issue has been discussed and besides it's also a whole community of WT users that do peer-to-peer help, like here only entirely WT.

[carguy84]

Is your server logging visitor's referrer to your logs? In IIS, it's off by default.

[MikeKent]

Thanks to both of you.

I'd sorted the IIS logging and have everything I need there.

It was indeed a case of WebTrends out of the box simply not preparing any Search Engine reports!

As suggested, a look in the knowledge base (sorry, don't know why I didn't start there) showed exactly how to enable the reports.

(In short, for the benefit of others, the dashboard can't show any summaries as there are no other SE reports to summarise. Using the admin config, you enable the dissabled reports and you are sorted. The KB covers the whole thing with screen grabs, etc.)

Thanks again.

[cgrantski]

Carguy, I completely missed the idea of not having the info in the logs in the first place. Duh. This is one time that the complicated version of the problem was more correct than the simple one.