Guide to WebTrends Query Parameters

Overview

Web analytics is about making business sense out of web visitor behavior – the same common sense analysis that business professionals have been applying to traditional offline business for decades. Gaining the appropriate insight to enable your organization to make smarter business decisions means understanding your site’s business objectives and determining the appropriate web metrics to provide that information.

Today’s business environment typically involves working at remote and off-site locations. Consequently, the people responsible for the website and those analyzing visitor activity on the website in order to measure web metrics often do not work side-by-side. That is, they are frequently in different groups and locations. This situation necessitates coordination between developing and rolling out content and reporting and analyzing the resultant activity.

To facilitate interaction between departments, locations and individuals, WebTrends introduces a new capability designed to place the power of analysis into the hands of those individuals who are most interested in it. This feature, WebTrends Query parameters, makes use of typical website instrumentation to facilitate the web analytics end-users want to see.

How WebTrends Query Parameters Work

By using WebTrends Query parameters when designing a site, reporting becomes a part of the design phase, eliminating the massive coordination and frequent misunderstandings that may take place when different groups objectives’ are at play. WebTrends Query parameters are passed in URLs via JavaScript to the WebTrends software analyzing the web logs. These processes then automatically configure the appropriate web analytics advanced features and create the appropriate reports.

Using WebTrends Query Parameters

The goal of many organizations is to limit the amount of manual intervention that is required to produce valuable reports. WebTrends Query parameters were designed to automate the configuration of the WebTrends software that uses them, making the WebTrends web analytics solutions more insightful with reduced effort.

For example, when using WebTrends SmartSource Data Collector to extract page titles, product names and information, or campaign names from HTML pages, you can insert WebTrends Query parameters in the HTML META tags to automatically configure the advanced features in the WebTrends reporting product.

Another simple example would be for the organization that wishes to streamline campaign analysis. By creating a custom “Campaign Submission” page in a company intranet that sends the WebTrends Query parameter to automatically trigger the WebTrends software to report on new campaigns, less time is spent on system configuration. Similar pages may be created for other applications, using any of the WebTrends Query parameters.

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