Hello,

i am setting up a new webtrends 8.7d server which tracks through an SDC and i have trouble with the search engines report.

at the referrer report i have for example 40% visiors through google, but at search engine there are 200 visitors out of 70.0000 on a certain day. so i got some search engine users as well es keywords / phrases. but way to less. what could the problem be?

That can't be right.

A couple of questions -

1. Have you been running this profile for very long? It's possible that for the Search reports your internal analysis tables have filled up. Check the Table Sizes tab when you edit the profile. That is one of the reports whose internal analysis tables fill up quickly.

2. Have you checked the Referring Sites report (as well as the Referring Domains report)? It will show all the little variations of .google. and you might be getting a lot of traffic from Google Image Search, which may not be tagged by WebTrends as a search engine. There may be other google variants with the same situation.

hey,

so its a fresh webtrends 8.7d server ans i analyse a site with traffic of approx. 15.000 visitors a day.

i have only one month in and ther should be a lots of traffic though google.

the reffering site ad page reports look fine, i have 7.500 visits through google here.

so just the search engines report are not correct.


edit:

report search keywords is looking good, cause here the referrals are listed as measure.

search phrases are looking fine, too.

initial search engines have very low visits (70 the best) and 1.189 page visits, still too low.

same curious amount wit "most recent search..." very less visits and some page views.

it should has something to do with the measure "visit" in comparison to "referral". what can this be?

What exactly are the names of the reports you are looking at? Are they out-of-the-box reports or have you done anything custom?

A given visit can have multiple "referrals" if the visitor jumps back to Google during the visit and then clicks again on the same listing or perhaps a different listing that refers to your site. The "referral" can happen at the beginning or during the visit. I haven't looked at the other reports you're talking about lately, but if the column is "visits" then they will only be counting "referrals" that happened on the very first hit of a visit.

Unless you have an odd situation, the discrepancy that you report is not likely.

Do the initial and most recent reports results match each other?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Chris G,

hello,

report for example "most recent search engines (all)". i am talking about the out-of-the-box custom reports.

the initial search engines report has the same amount of visits, but more page views than the "most recent search engines report". dont know why.


so every webtrends account (most of them are ondemand) do match approximately the google referrer and the search engine reports if you look at the visits.

here, there has to be a failure, cause 5.000 referrers through google on one day but 200 visits or so. that is impossible.


but, couldnt the problem be cause of the cookie problem we still have? there we have problems with new vs. returning report etc. maybe webtrends does not count the visits correct? I think its hard to say from your point of view.


cookie problem: still waitung for support, i tried all. seems that the sdc is sending a cookie but not receive one back or so. we have wt.co=no in every log and never an wt.co_f value. cant explain why.

many trouble and the customer is waiting and waiting and we will get in big trouble


you dont can give support through skye or icq or so?

cplxx remember that this is mostly a peer-to-peer forum so you are getting helped by other customers.

WebTrends tech support does have the ability to look at your screen.

If you post a URL for your site I can look at your cookie situation etc. but I'm not a WT employee.

The cookie is probably at the core of this. The Most Recent and Initial search engine reports REQUIRE that visitor history be turned on, and visitor history HAS TO HAVE a working persistent cookie. Otherwise those two reports will be empty or close to it, which is what you are getting.

Since you are hosting SDC yourself, you need to be sure the SDC server is set up correctly for cooke serving. You aren't trying to run SDC and WebTrends on the same server, are you?

hey,

unfortunately we only have access to the webtrends server and i am working with this one.

i only have access to DSC logfiles, so its another server not sat up by me.

we did get the dcs.cfg file but this looks correct.

you can have a look to www.gfd.de maybe you see what the cookie problem is or what our customer has to change on sdc?

would be great if you can help

Not sure what "cookie problem" you're referring to. I just took a look at www.gfd.de and I can clearly see a co_f being passed in the SDC hit.

As far as the reports go, when you're looking at the search engine and search phrase reports that come with the product, they're probably hitting their table limits resulting in a great many of the google hits going to the "other" bucket on the report. If you look at the totals you'll probably see a great many in the "Other" line.

With the large volume of traffic you're seeing, for search engine reporting we'll probably want to help you adjust a profile to be specifically dedicated to tracking only search traffic.

One such adjustment, is to copy that profile, and edit the profile and uncheck all except the daily report periods. Another change is to increase the table limits on the search engine reports by at least 3x their default setting.

Since these are OnDemand accounts we should be able to look at them fairly easily. Did you actually call into support and get a case opened, or did you just e-mail us? If there's an open case on it that I can find, I'll touch base with the EMEA support team and see if I can find out where they're going with their troubleshooting.

EDIT: I was unable to locate a case for you, if you got an e-mail from us on it, can you give me a case number, or an agent you were working with?

Neil - it's not On Demand, it's their own WT server and SDC server.

There's another topic from cplxx in "Installation, Configuration, and Administration" that deals with cplxx's cookie/sessionizing problem. For some reason, the SDC log lines don't have the wt.co_f value in them. I don't know how or why as I also see the parameter properly passed in sdc requests from my browser.

There's definitely something wrong with the SDC configuration. Though the entire SDC CFG file is not provided. Even if it was, I'm no expert on all of the configuration options.

hey neil,

as already said its an software webtrends system, not ondemand.

so the tracking on the site is correct but if you watch the http transfer and ecspecially the cookies you see that something goes wrong. the cookies are not sent/written correctly and according to that, the logile neither.

the case is #00477121 and i already talked to j.williams today but we are not comming forward so far

i had already a phone conference to the customer so that webtrends support can talk with me and them (they only have access to sdc) but i was not necessary so far in the mind of webtrends.

so we are already way over time and in this case i cannot solve the problem.

Hello Cplxx:
I think we can resolve your issues more quickly with a phone call so I've assigned this to our T3 engineer and he will be reaching out to to today.

hey wayne,

sorry but i almost give up know. i am talking to j.williams since yesterday and we changed some dcs.cfg values. no success.

i neve had so much trouble with web analysis but i am not an webtrends software specialist.

there is so less working right now:

- no cookies -> returning visior report
- no most recent search engine report
- no campaigning
- no single level path
- old data is not possible to analyse (nothing happends, processing on a day for hours, no error message)

- and the best one: since SDC restart of the customer no logging is done on SDC at all. for 6 minutes there wer created *.dcsbusy files and since that, no new logs.
i think the customer will be really happy about this with 500.000 PIs a day


sorry for my bad mood but its so annoying.

quote:

almost give up know. i am talking

Hello cplxx:

I completely understand your frustration. You have nothing to apologize for.

Please don't give up, we can make this successful. Since this is an issue with the SDC logging I have set the priority level to severity 1/critical.

I have assigned a very high level engineer and he will be calling you shortly.

Again I apologize for the delay in getting a solution to you. We will engage every applicable resource available to get a resolution to you asap.