Has anyone found a way to filter iPhone users? I want to create a profile that just looks at mobile visitors. There is no filter for platform and the browser filter doesn't do it. These visitors are using Safari.

Wouldn't the iPhone have it's own operating system registered?

Yes, but I can't filter on platform, only on browser. This is a huge hole in the functionality of WebTrends.

The platform is in the user agent string. Webtrends is parsing the browser and OS/platform data from the user agent string in your logs. You can filter on this as either a custom report filter or a profile level filter. So, say you create a filter based on agent for 'iPhone', and tack it on to a custom report. If your report is based on 'browser' as a dimension, it's going to show Safari, since the iPhone browser is based on Apple's Web Kit. You'll never see 'iPhone' in a browsers report since the iPhone isn't a browser, it's a device, a platform.

If you apply such a filter at the profile level, it will include only iPhone users in that profile. Not really a true estimate of mobile traffic though as many people use mobile browsers (BlackBerry, Nokia, other phones) that are not iPhones, but every report in the profile will be for iPhone users anyway.

I'd suggest that you do a quick scan of your logs (perl/gawk/whatever) to see what mobile devices are manifesting themselves in the user agent strings in your log, and then you can use that list to set up the filters for your mobile traffic.

I can see it in the user-agent. The software version 8.5 does not have an option to filter on a string in the user-agent field. Is nobody else asking for this?

WT support was able to show me that a string search can be done in the browser filter dialog. A string of 'iPhone' will pick up the iPhone platform.
There was a lot of work in WT to include WAP and Palm information but it seems iPhone is being left off the radar.

I'm also testing up a filter for low screen resolutions. Again, a funky way to get them, using a regex for any page with the WT.sr parameter = ^...x|x...$ will include visitors with lower screen resolutions. I can then see the platforms they are using to see how many are mobile visitors, not only iPhone.

With everyone trying to define a mobile visitor strategy, it seems WT could do better in helping customers segment and evaluate this traffic.

Hi Sheila,

Can you give an example how you set up your "browser" filter to include specific platform?

I am in similar situation - I have a profile for our mobile site and I want to EXCLUDE visits from computers OS (i.e. Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7...).

If you have a solution, it will save me a lot of time

Thx!

Michael

Ok - forget about it.
It was actually very simple:

To include specific mobile device
- Create a hit filter (include)
- Select browser
- Enter name of mobile device(s) (e.g. "iPhone")

To exclude non-mobile devices
- Create a hit filter (exclude)
- Select browser
- Enter name of most common PC platforms (e.g. "Windows 5" "Windows 6" "Macintosh"...)

Seems to work.

Michael