ClickTracks User Manual ClickTracks

Transcription

1 ClickTracks User Manual

2 ClickTracks Web Analytics Done Right ClickTracks is the culmination of extensive research and development in the areas of website and user behavior analysis. Our goal in creating ClickTracks has been to provide complex data in a simple way, and to display that data in context. We have tried to keep the software simple to use and the results easy to understand at a glance. This manual will help you get the most from ClickTracks, and by extension will help you better meet the needs of your website visitors.

3 Contents I Table of Contents Foreword 1 The ClickTracks Way 3 Behavior data... 4 Comparing... behavior 7 System Requirements... 8 QuickStart 10 Datasets 13 New Dataset... Wizard 13 Opening... Existing Datasets 14 Importing Logfiles 16 Downloading... log files over FTP 16 What Do I Enter For... Username & Password? 17 Which Files... to Download 17 Import Only... The New Logfiles 18 Importing... local / LAN files 18 Web Server... Log Formats 19 Compressed... / Rotated Log Files 19 Virtual Servers... / Multi-domain Logfiles 20 What If There... Are No Logfiles? 20 Troubleshooting... & Help 20 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 23 Navigation... Report 24 Browser View Using The Browser How The Link Reports... Are Calculated 26 JavaScript, Pop-up... menus and DHTML 27 Hiding Link Reports Page Analysis View Date Periods How Page Analysis... Reports Are Calculated 29 Path View How Path View... Reports Are Calculated 31 How The Navigation... Numbers Are Calculated 31 Search Report Search Engine Parameters Search Report Configuration How Search Engine... Reports Are Calculated 33 I

4 II ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Content Targeted Ads... Report 34 Tracking Pay-Per-Click... (PPC) 35 Site Overview How Site Overview... Reports Are Calculated 36 Campaign,... sales and ROI Report 38 Configuring Campaigns Importing Google... And Overture Campaigns 41 Overture Tracking URLs Campaigns Currencies Other Than... US Dollars 42 Referrer Details Showing Referring... Parameter Values 43 Robot Report How The Robot Report... is Calculated 45 Exporting Reports 47 Export to... PDF 47 Export to... Excel 47 Real World Analysis Examples 49 Analysis... of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns 49 Goal Page... Analysis 51 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics 54 Visitor Labeling:... The Way Of ClickTracks 54 Using The Label Wizard Reached Goal Page Compare Search... Engines 56 Compare Search... Referrals 57 Traditional Search... vs PPC 57 Returning Visitors Ad Tracking Search vs Content... Targeted 58 Before And After Short Visit Length Advanced... Visitor Labeling 59 Creating A New Label Referrer Label Referred from any... Search Engine 62 Entry Page Label Visited Page Label Ad Campaign Label Visit Date Label Session Length... Label 63 Search Engine Query... Label 63 Visited on Certain... Days of the Week 63 Visited on Certain... Times of the Day 64 Exit Page Label IP Address Label... 64

5 Contents III Cookie Label URL Parameter... Label 65 From a Certain Country Advanced Labeling... Options 65 Label Name & Color Examples of Labeling Editing labels Options & Configuration 70 Display Options Navigation Report Options Search Report Limits Site Overview Limits Analysis... Options 71 Default Pages Case Sensitive Server... Files 71 Combine Search Engine... Statistics 72 Content Targeted Ads... Domain 72 Alternate Domain Names Exclusions Ignore Filenames That... Contain 73 Ignore Requests From... IPs 73 Performance Referrer Parameter... Details 74 Site Overview And... Page Analysis 74 Search Report Advanced... Options 74 Session Timeout Parameters Parameter Names Case... Sensitive 75 Display New Windows... / Popups 75 Show "Create Label"... Links 75 Discard Other Virtual... Servers 75 URL to Distinguish... Links 76 Sites Built With Frames 78 IFrames Dynamic Page Parameters 80 How Parameter... Masking Works 81 ClickTracks Analyzer Compared to Professional 83 Cookie Handling Sites That... Span Multiple Domains 84 Daily use of ClickTracks 86 Adding log... files 86 Selecting... date range 86 III

6 IV ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Advanced Topics 89 Websites... Containing Multiple Domains 89 How ClickTracks... Determines a Visitor Session 89 How ClickTracks... Uses Cookies 90 Using Persistent Cookies... To Improve Campaign Tracking 91 Configuring... Web Servers 91 Internet Information... Server (IIS) 92 Apache Strip Out... File Types 93 Robots &... Spiders 93 Search Engine... Parameters & Keywords 94 Distinguishing... Duplicated Links 94 Tracking... External Links 95 Why The... Numbers Don't Match Other Stats Programs 95 Troubleshooting 98 Page Not... Found 98 No Links... Inside Page 98 Logfile Import... Warning 98 Performance... Tuning 99 Articles 101 Comparing... PPC Numbers To Your Search Engine 101 Do PPC... tracking parameters affect Search Engine Spiders? 102 Zen And... The Art Of Tracking Parameters 103 Index 105

7 Foreword 1 Foreword ClickTracks is a completely unique way of understanding website visitor behavior. We hope you find the software powerful and easy to use. We constantly strive to perfect our products. If you have feedback or comments I would like to hear from you. My address is jmarshall@clicktracks.com. Sincerely John Marshall CEO

8 The ClickTracks Way

9 The ClickTracks Way 3 1 The ClickTracks Way Understanding web user behavior is vital to online businesses. ClickTracks shows how visitors navigate through your website, where they spend time and what they do. You may be familiar with website statistics products, and perhaps already use one. ClickTracks is fundamentally different than statistics products: 1. Information is displayed in context with the site being analyzed. At a glance you will see how visitors navigate and use your site. 2. Visitors are quickly and easily segmented into different groups to compare behavior. Compare which advertising campaign produces the desired actions from visitors. 3. ClickTracks is interactive and responsive. Explore data about your visitors quickly and easily. Get results in seconds. Each page of your site presents multiple pathways your visitors can take. Which links are effective and result in the desired visitor actions? ClickTracks shows website use patterns overlaid on your actual website: When seen through ClickTracks, this becomes: For any link within your site you can measure what they click. Using ClickTracks you see your own website and simultaneously how your visitors behave: where they click, how long they spend on a page, where they came from. By presenting both the data and the website simultaneously, ClickTracks can show simply and intuitively how your website is used.

10 4 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Different visitors to your site have different expectations. The person reaching your site through a search engine will exhibit different behavior than the person clicking on an advertisement. ClickTracks instantly shows different groups of visitors and compares their behavior. Your website and visitor profile changes every day. ClickTracks makes it simple to change how you divide your visitors into groups and compare their behavior. If you've used web statistics software already, you'll be used to seeing static reports and hard to understand charts. ClickTracks is different. It's interactive and responsive. You're not limited to a set of static reports but instead ClickTracks gives you the tools to explore the data and see your site from a different perspective: that of your visitors. 1.1 Behavior data ClickTracks displays data about your website in highly visual reports which are easy to understand at a glance. Browser View ClickTracks shows your website using the built-in browser and overlays visitor behavior data on each link within the pages. The percentage of visitors clicking any link is shown next to the link itself.

11 The ClickTracks Way 5 Page Analysis View Displays visitor behavior data that concerns the entire page. The average view time of the page, or % of people exiting the site at the page. As you browse through the site the reports change dynamically to reflect the page being viewed. Path View Provides an overview of your site and highlights the most important activities. At a glance it shows which referring sites are most important and which pages are common entry and exit points for visitors. Search Report The Search Report shows each term coming from the different search engines and the number of visits generated. The background of each cell is colored a shade of blue that is darker the more popular a term is for a given engine. Popular terms from different engines can be understood at a glance.

12 6 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Campaigns and ROI Shows the activity on each of your campaigns and how much they cost you. ClickTracks professional only: also shows how much revenue they each generated. Site Overview Similar to traditional web stats views of site activity, the Site Overview shows the entire site and displays the global activity. This makes it possible to see the big picture quickly before zooming in to specific areas of interest. What's Changed ClickTracks professional only The What's Changed report looks for statistically significant changes in the site data across two time periods

13 The ClickTracks Way Comparing behavior More than 'what happens': why it happens ClickTracks displays visitor behavior data simply and intuitively. To really understand how your visitors behave you need to divide them into different groups and compare them against each other. Knowing the average time spent on a page is helpful, but alone it doesn't help make more effective business decisions. ClickTracks uses a concept called 'Labeling' to divide and compare different groups of visitors. Comparing labeled groups does more than answer 'what happens'. It answers 'why it happens'. A common problem for an online business is understanding the effectiveness of advertising. ClickTracks goes far beyond simply tracking how many referrals a banner ad campaign produces. Using ClickTracks you can quickly and easily identify how visitors referred by the campaign behave compared to other visitors: Create a label that identifies visitors reaching you through a search engine Create another label that identifies visitors coming via your ad campaign. Within seconds you see the actions taken by your two labeled groups compared to your overall visitors. Every link now shows the 3 groups broken out separately. Page view times, entry points and every aspect of visitor behavior can now be seen and compared among the different groups.

14 8 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Labeling visitors is an incredibly powerful tool for revealing the true picture of website use. labels can be created to reveal many different behavior patterns. For example: Label visitors who have seen a special offer on a certain page. Do more of them buy? Label those entering at certain pages on the site. Do they spend more or less time? Does the page need updating? Label referred visitors from each advertising partner. Do they navigate to the correct page? Where do they exit your site? 1.3 System Requirements ClickTracks is installed on a standard Windows desktop computer. If you already use other web statistics packages you may be used to running those packages on the web server. The interactive nature of ClickTracks and the method of analysis used is easier to administer and operate from a workstation. You will need access to the web server logfiles in addition, either by downloading over FTP or through Windows file sharing / LAN. For the ClickTracks application itself, the minimum configuration is: Windows 98, NT 4 (service pack 6), ME, 2000, 2003 or XP Pentium III 500 MHz 256Mb RAM 500 Mb disk Note: Windows 95 is not supported. Depending on how many hits your website receives ClickTracks may need to read multiple gigabytes of logfile data. A faster CPU and more RAM will make a big difference to performance. If possible we recommend: Windows 2000 or XP (the virtual memory and multitasking is much more efficient than Windows 98 / Me) Pentium 4 1Ghz 512Mb RAM

15 QuickStart

16 10 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 2 QuickStart New Create a new dataset. A dataset in ClickTracks contains all the data for analyzing a single site. Import Import logfiles from your web server. Logfiles are stored on the server with your web pages, usually in a special directory. An external FTP tool can be used to download logfiles or you can use the FTP window built into ClickTracks. Start with about one month of the most recent data. More detail Toolbar icons: View Reports Navigation Report - the unique three-pane view of your site, overlaid with the visitor behavior data. Search Report - keywords that visitors used to reach your site, broken out by search engine. Site Overview - entry & exit pages, overall visitor count. If you have used other web statistics programs you will find this familiar.

17 QuickStart 11 Campaigns and ROI - mapping campaigns to resulting sales revenue directly from the shopping cart. If applicable this icon provides access to the feature. What's Changed Report A list of the most significantly increasing and decreasing keywords, pages, referrers etc. across two specific time periods. Labeling visitors The true power of ClickTracks is exposed when you start labeling visitors and separating them into different groups for comparison. With a few clicks you can compare SEO to PPC visitors, or advertising effectiveness. The Task Wizard can guide you through the process. More detail Other icons used in ClickTracks Referring site - how visitors find your site Site entry point - the first page visitors see. Site exit point - the last page visitors see before they exit.

18 Datasets

19 Datasets 13 3 Datasets A central concept within ClickTracks is the Dataset. A Dataset is analogous to a file in other programs like Word. A Word file contains the text relating to a single project, book, article etc. In the same way a Dataset contains all the information ClickTracks needs to analyze a single website. The term Dataset is used because it's actually a collection of files serving different purposes, and not a single file as it would be in Word. Each website you analyze will have its own Dataset which will serve to: 1. Keep data for each website separated from other websites 2. Imported logfiles become part of the dataset so old logs never need to be imported 3. Retain a complete historical record for the website, permitting analysis of any period of time 4. Automatically save all your settings and analysis parameters so when you quit ClickTracks and later reopen, you'll be exactly where you left off. When you start ClickTracks for the first time, the New Dataset Wizard appears and will guide you through the process of creating a dataset. If you're a consultant you will create many different datasets - one for each client website. You can launch the New Dataset Wizard from the file menu at any time. ClickTracks always opens the last used Dataset automatically. You will also notice there is no Save command in the File Menu. This is because Datasets are always saved on exit and at various times during analysis. See Also New Dataset Wizard Opening Existing Datasets 3.1 New Dataset Wizard The New Dataset Wizard is used to easily set up the analysis of the website. Step 1: Enter the URL of the website you will be analyzing and press 'Go'. Your site will appear in a preview area. Sites that span multiple domains require ClickTracks Professional for successful analysis of visitors as they move from one domain to another. A site is considered to be multidomain if a single visitor session can take the visitor to more than one site, and by implication, more than one logfile. Some limited data from multi-domain sites can be extracted from Analyzer if certain conditions are met. See Multiple Domain Websites Step 2: Specify other names for the site. The wizard calculates common variations of the domain name entered in step 1 such a bobsfruit.com for and also the server IP address. Important: The alternate domain names list must include all domains that are part of the site. Be sure to include domain aliases that point to the same content, such as If your site is spans multiple domains or you use external shopping cart, newsletter or similar services, make sure you read Multiple Domain Websites. Step 3: Select whether your web server is case sensitive in its handling of files. Almost all Unix / Linux servers are case sensitive, while Windows is not. If you don't know then choose 'not case sensitive' as this will almost always be acceptable for any web server. See Case Sensitive Server Files in the options section for more information. Step 4: Select which server-side scripting language you use on your site, if any. Chose 'static' if you use CGI Perl scripts or another dynamic page script that is not listed. Your choice here influences : 1. The session cookie ClickTracks will use if present in the logfile to help distinguish visitors with the same IP. See How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session and How ClickTracks Uses Cookies. 2. The default page for the site (index.html, default.asp etc). See Default Pages Step 5: ClickTracks will suggest a pathname for the dataset. The path defaults to [My Documents]\ClickTracks

20 14 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Datasets\wwwyoursitecom\wwwyoursitecom.tks. The file yoursite.tks is one of several files that will be placed in this directory. If you change the path from the default, be aware that ClickTracks will create many files in the directory you choose. 3.2 Opening Existing Datasets Once you've made a dataset ClickTracks will automatically open it each time you start the program, and you settings and reports are exactly as you left them. You can create additional datasets for other websites and open them from the file menu.

21 Importing Logfiles

22 16 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 4 Importing Logfiles Importing logfiles is the single most difficult problem you will encounter in setting up ClickTracks. We strive to make the process as easy as we can, but there are always some problems we can't anticipate. The most common difficulty is simply logging in to the correct server and account / password. There is no common standard among ISPs for how this works, but the following tips may help you: 1. You'll login over FTP to a server. This server name is usually the same as the domain name for your website. If it's not then your ISP will have given you a different FTP server name for uploading web pages to. The FTP server for logfiles is almost certainly the same. 2. The username and password are usually the same as those for uploading web pages or your admin account 3. You may need to enable passive (firewall) mode depending on your network configuration. 4. If you can't find the logfiles contact your ISP. Ask them for access to the raw web server logs. You can import the logfiles directly into ClickTracks using the built-in FTP tool, or you can download them outside ClickTracks to a file and then import this file. Tip: You never need to import old logfile data into ClickTracks. The dataset retains all the data as you import it, including the entire history. You should only import the new logfiles, though if you do accidentally import older data or that partially overlaps existing data ClickTracks will intelligently remove the duplicated entries. Since this process takes some time you should try to import only new data and not rely on ClickTracks' ability to sort through the duplicates. 4.1 Downloading log files over FTP ClickTracks contains an FTP tool that can connect to your web server and allow you to select the logfiles you wish to process. It will then automatically download and process the data.

23 Importing Logfiles 17 When the FTP window is first opened there is no connection to the server. Enter the server name, user name and password. (This is normally the same login and password as is used or uploading web pages to the server. Otherwise, it will be provided by your web hosting company or technical staff). Then click Connect. After a short delay the display will update and show a list of files and directories on the server. It behaves very similarly to the Windows file open dialog. Folders are shown as and files as. Files that have changed since the last time the dialog was opened are displayed as Which Files to Download to help identify the correct files to download. The Server will default to port 21, which is the standard FTP port. However, if your FTP is running on a different port, you can change the port number following the colon (:) after the domain in the Server setting. You can navigate through the file system of the server using: Up Dir Change Dir Double-click on Move up the directory structure, towards the top level. Change the directory to the selection in the file browser on the left. Change directory. When you have identified the server logfiles you can select them (hold down Shift or Ctrl to select more than one) and click Get Files (double-clicking a file does the same thing). The files are downloaded and stored, ready for processing when you click Done. Advanced settings The advanced settings can be altered by checking the Advanced box. Only change these if you know what you're doing! Auto-resume: Downloads only the new data added to the file since last time. For logfiles that are continually appended by the server this is very useful. A copy of the file is retained in the directory named Raw within the dataset. Passive (firewall) mode: For use when the PC is behind a firewall that does not support standard FTP. Secure FTP (SFTP): This will allow your log files to be transmitted in an encrypted mode What Do I Enter For Username & Password? Look for logfiles on your web server Different ISPs have different ways of granting access to the logfiles. Although there's no standard, the most common is FTP using the same server name/login/password that are used for uploading web pages. Ask your ISP 'How do I get access to my raw logfiles' Server is the domain name of the server containing logfiles. This is often the same as the domain name for your web server eg but it's sometimes a generic name such as ftp.hostingcompany.net The username and password are usually the same for administering the site or uploading pages. Your ISP will have given you this administrative account when you signed up. See also Which Files to Download, Troubleshooting & Help and What If You Have No Logfiles? 4.2 Which Files to Download When you first view the directory in the FTP window, you may well find a set of files named 'stats' or similar. Often these files will have extensions like.bin and a group of.html files. It's important to realize that such files are not the logfiles ClickTracks needs to read, but are in fact the output files from some other stats program running on your server, such as Analog or WUseage. ClickTracks needs access to the raw logfiles.

24 18 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Examples of the files you should download: IIS on Windows ex log or ex log.gz The name indicates the date range in YYMMDD format, and it typically spans one day. The above example would contain all transactions for June 26th Download whichever dates you want to analyze. Apache on Linux access access.1.gz want them. access.2.gz... <---this is the current logfile. Download it. <---these are older rotated logfiles. Depending on the rotation schedule you may or may not it's safest to grab them all and let ClickTracks work out the dates. Cobalt RaQ web.cache web.cache.new web.log <---download this file web.stats <---NOT this file. It contains internal data used by the stats package that ships preinstalled on a RaQ. 4.3 Import Only The New Logfiles The dataset already contains a complete representation of previously imported logfiles so you shouldn't import old logfiles. Although doing so is harmless because duplicates are discarded this process impacts performance. 4.4 Importing local / LAN files You can also import logfiles from a local hard drive or network share. A network share is most common for IIS users. By default, IIS logfiles are stored in the c:\winnt\system32\logfiles\w3svc1 directory. These files have the naming convention ex*.log Example directory of IIS logfiles:

25 Importing Logfiles 19 The name indicates the range of dates contained in YYMMDD format. The top file in the above example contains data for February 4th, Your LAN administrator can give you direct access to this directory so you can read the files. In some instances (typically a small intranet) you may even have the files on your own machine. 4.5 Web Server Log Formats ClickTracks can read logfiles generated from the following web servers: IIS 3.0 through 6.0 (W3C extended format) * Apache Netscape / iplanet * the convlog command line utility supplied by Microsoft can be used to convert the older proprietary IIS 3 and 4 log format to W3 extended, which can then be imported into ClickTracks. ClickTracks will automatically configure itself according to the logfile format. There is no need to specify this format or the fields yourself. If you'd like to know which fields ClickTracks requires or are considering adjusting the server configuration, please see Configuring Web Servers 4.6 Compressed / Rotated Log Files As the web server writes transactions to the logfile it will grow in size, potentially becoming unmanageably large over time. Many web servers are configured to periodically 'rotate' the logfile to keep the size manageable while avoiding the loss of any data. The server typically does this once per month for smaller sites, and weekly or daily for higher traffic websites. A typical web server writes to a logfile named 'access.log' or similar. When the logfile is rotated it is given a name that reflects the period of time that it spans, 'access_april.log' for example. After renaming the file, the server creates a new file under the 'access.log' file name and starts writing the latest data to it - May in this example. The older data is therefore rotated into archive files. The directory containing the logfiles on the server might have several older files with names that indicate the periods they span, plus a file containing the data for current period that is updated with each client request as it's received. The web server often also compresses the older data as it rotates it into archive. On Unix systems the format most often used is.gz (GNU Zip). Compressing the data is very efficient because logfiles contain much repetitive data, resulting in files that are 10% of the original size. A very common scenario is therefore to have the following files on the web server: access.log april_2001.gz march_2001.gz february_2001.gz Access.log contains all web requests from May 1st onwards. The other 3 files contain data for each month as indicated from the names. When you use ClickTracks, you do not need to worry about reading the same data twice. If you import a logfile which ClickTracks has read part of before, it will simply ignore the lines it has previously read. Virtual Servers / Multiple Domain Logfiles

26 20 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 4.7 Virtual Servers / Multi-domain Logfiles A single web server is often used to host many individual websites through a process known as virtual servers. An ISP will almost always divide the resulting entries in the main logfile into individual logfiles for each distinct website, so each customers logfile contains only requests for their website. If you host your own servers you may be generating a logfile that contains requests for all the sub domains or different sites, and you want to see these distinctly from each other. Your logfile contains a field that specifies the domain name of the site to which the request was directed. Logfiles in this format are known as multidomain or multi-home. If this field is present ClickTracks will compare the value against the site names specified in the new dataset wizard. The comparison matches in turn the domain names from the wizard - both the main site name and the alternate names. Lines from the log are discarded if they originated from a server not listed. Occasionally you may want to have a multidomain log imported with all domains included. In this case turn off the option to Discard Other Virtual Servers and the dataset will contain all requests. If the logfile is multi-domain and does not contain the virtual server name field then ClickTracks has no way to work out which domain the request belongs in. For Apache this field is the virtual server name or %v in the log directive line, for IIS it's cs-host. See Configuring Web Servers. If your site has a number of sub domains that you'd like to analyze separately you should make a new dataset for each one, and set the alternate server names such that only the matching names are included. Then import the same single logfile into each dataset. 4.8 What If There Are No Logfiles? Some ISPs simply don't provide logfiles, for example Yahoo Stores. In this case you can signup for ClickTracks Hosted. You'll get the same great analytics tools and reporting and a special script you place on each page will gather the data instead of your logfile. See our website for more information. 4.9 Troubleshooting & Help Tip: After clicking Connect you'll see a hyperlink in The ClickTracks Way that will let you View FTP Diagnostics. You will see the actual communications commands from the FTP dialog to the FTP server, including error messages returned from the remote server. Can't find server: Change the firewall setting in advanced options. Some firewalls actually work correctly if the setting is inverted from what you would expect. Can't connect to server: The server name is probably your website domain name or a generic name like ftp.hostingco.net, or sometimes an IP address. If you upload pages to your web server using FTP then try that server name and login here. Ask you hosting company for FTP access to your raw logfiles. Incorrect username / password: These are almost certainly the same as your user name and password for uploading pages or administering the site. Can't find logfiles: Try clicking Up Dir and/or looking inside other directories. See Which Files to Download Wrong format: The most common cause of this error is that the file is not actually a logfile. Sometimes the server has directories of files named stats or similar but these are not actually logfiles that ClickTracks can read. They are typically HTML output files from an old stats program running on your server. Missing fields: ClickTracks requires a certain minimum number of fields present in the logfile. See Configuring Web Servers No logfiles? Some hosting companies simply don't provide logfiles. In this case you can signup for ClickTracks Hosted. You'll get the same great reports and analysis and the data is gathered through a

27 Importing Logfiles 21 JavaScript object placed in each page of your site.

28 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates

29 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 23 5 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates ClickTracks contains several fundamental report types. It is important to understand that the reports in themselves provide only general information about your site. Each report is enhanced through the use of visitor labeling. Navigation Report How visitors navigate your site - the unique three-pane view of your site, overlaid with the visitor behavior data. Search Report Search keywords that visitors used to reach your site, broken out by search engine. OR Campaign, sales and ROI Report (ROI in ClickTracks Professional only:) A list of your ad campaigns, with the cost of each, the revenue generated and the final ROI. Site Overview Overview of your site - entry & exit pages, overall visitor count, overall search terms, visitors, unique visitors etc. Robot report (ClickTracks Professional and Optimizer only, logfiles only) A breakdown of search engine robot/spider activity by frequency, recency and pages crawled. Time Periods Some reports are further broken down into different time periods:

30 24 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer All dates The reports span the entire range of dates chosen for analysis. Day Data for the only the most recent day in the date range is displayed. Week The 'Week' period shows the most recent week in the date range with each day broken out separately. Month Shows the most recent five-week span in the date range. Each week is broken out separately. Six Months Past 6 months broken out by month. 5.1 Navigation Report The Navigation Report is the unique view that ClickTracks gives you of visitor behavior at your site, mapped on top of your own pages. It displays visitor behavior data in three different views simultaneously. The views work together to build up a complete picture of how visitors interact with the site. Browser View The Browser View occupies the upper left portion of the ClickTracks window. It shows link-by-link the percentage of clicks from the specific page being viewed. Page Analysis View Upper right in the main window, the Page Analysis View details visitor activity for the corresponding page shown in the Browser View. In contrast to the Browser View break down of clicks by hyperlink, the Page Analysis View shows visitor behavior across the complete page. Path View The Path View is displayed in the lower part of the window. The current page being viewed is represented at the top center of the view. To the left are pages saw before the current page, with external referring sites highlighted in blue. To the right are pages viewed from here. Arrow thickness indicates popularity of the pathway and boxes are ordered with most popular at the top. Each of these views may be toggled on and off by clicking the toolbar buttons, or from the View menu Browser View What you'll see

31 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 25 The browser built into ClickTracks displays a live view of your website exactly as Internet Explorer would. In addition it highlights each link with the percentage of clicks it receives from the current page in the browser. These Link Reports provide an instant view of how visitors navigate the site. Absolute numbers This hyperlink was clicked 10% of the time by visitors that saw the current page. Multiple clicks by the same visitor within the same session are counted Some hyperlinks are obscured when in evaluation mode. They are revealed on purchase Duplicated link: this hyperlink was clicked 20% of the time by visitors that saw the current page, however this page has other links leading to the same target page, so ClickTracks cannot tell which of the duplicated links was clicked. See Distinguishing Duplicated Links This hyperlink leads to a page that is outside the dataset. If this page is inside a site for which you have access to logfiles / javascript data you can use ClickTracks Professional to bring this domain inside the dataset. If the link goes to a site over which you have no control - in other words it really is external, see Tracking External Links The target of the hyperlink is contained within JavaScript code. In most cases pressing F2 on the keyboard, then releasing the key and clicking on the link will help ClickTracks determine the target of the link and display a bar. See JavaScript, Popup menus and DHTML If you hover your mouse pointer over one of the percentage bars a tooltip appears and tells you the absolute number of clicks. Additional controls for link reports F7: Show or hide all link reports. F2: Interpret JavaScript destination for the next link clicked and display a link report. F3: Refresh the link reports F4: Hide the link report currently under the mouse Ctrl Up-Arrow: Make link reports more opaque (less transparent) Ctrl Down-Arrow: Make link reports less opaque (more transparent) Threshold You can set a threshold below which link reports are not displayed. See Navigation Report Options Show me how Using the browser Using The Browser The browser within ClickTracks works as you would expect. It's based on Internet Explorer, using the version already installed on your PC. The ClickTracks toolbar contains the standard browser controls: Back Forward Stop Reload Home Return to the previous page Right-click displays a popup menu with full history. Move forward through the page history Stop loading the current page. Reload and display the page at the current URL Return to the front page of ClickTracks.

32 26 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer The browser also supports the favorites folder from IE and can load and save any favorite web page. The website displayed by ClickTracks is live. Every link on the pages can be clicked and the new page will be displayed with the respective visitor behavior data. Simply navigate to the page that you wish to understand and see the data displayed. On complex pages with many links the page may be overwhelmed with graphs and data. Use the F7 key to hide the Link reports, then navigate to the page you wish to view, then toggle the reports on again How The Link Reports Are Calculated The link reports show you what people click on. Every click by every visitor is recorded, even if it's the same visitor clicking through multiple times on the same link. Such click behavior is active: the visitor to the site really is motivated to click those links multiple times, so ClickTracks accurately reflects this. Unique visitors, visitor sessions etc. are not factored into this calculation. % bars factor incorporate the exit rate Since exiting is a valid action users can take, the % bars include this in the denominator. Each percentage bar is: (clicks from current->target) / (clicks from current to another internal page + exits from current) Link Reports are based on clicks, not visitors or unique visitors An exit is counted when it's the last page a visitor sees. The absolute numbers are visible in a tooltip if you hover over the percentage bar. The link reports always show clicks specifically from the current page in the browser to each target URL. The time period for link reports is the entire date range under analysis. See Selecting date range Why percentages sometimes don't add up to 100% Sometimes the Link reports on a page do not add up to 100%. The most common reasons are: 1. Back button is being used by the visitors. They do not follow any pathway out of this page - they return to the previous page and follow a path out from there. 2. Some of the Links are duplicated. The page contains two or more links that lead to the same target page. ClickTracks can detect all the links in the HTML during display, but cannot determine from the logfile which link was clicked since the target is the same. All the links leading to the page will be highlighted with the same chart, displayed with a white diagonal stripes pattern. (Note that parameter masking can sometimes make pages appear the same to ClickTracks when in fact they're different. See Dynamic Page Parameters for more information.) Show me how Advanced users of ClickTracks may want to modify the website link structure to permit duplicated links to be distinguished. See Distinguishing Duplicated Links for more information 3. A link has been removed from the page yet still appears in the logfile. This can happen when significant changes are made to the website structure while still analyzing the older logfile data. The solution is to constrain the range of dates being analyzed to span only the dates after the website changes. 4. Conversely, the link has been recently added to the page and is not yet appearing in the log data imported into ClickTracks. 5. The activity for the link is below the Link Display Threshold. See Configuration Options for how to lower the threshold. Show me how

33 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 27 Pop-up menus and DHTML JavaScript, Pop-up menus and DHTML JavaScript links After ClickTracks has rendered the HTML for the page it parses the HTML looking for <a href=> and other labels, examining each one and matching that against clicks seen, finally displaying a % bar near them. This process does not work in situations where the <a href> element uses an onclick event handler and then JavaScript to navigate to a new URL. Although ClickTracks knows that a hyperlink is hidden inside JavaScript, it cannot know where that link leads until after the JavaScript is executed, and therefore cannot place a % bar next to it. The only way to know which page the JavaScript will lead to is to execute the script by clicking the link. ClickTracks contains a special mechanism that can work out the target of each JavaScript link when clicked. From the keyboard press and release F2 then click the JavaScript link. ClickTracks executes the JavaScript but traps the target before the navigation to that page takes place. It can then match this target URL against the data seen in the clickstream. This process must be repeated for each link on the page. ClickTracks can't parse the page and reliably extract every JavaScript link and execute the underlying script automatically. The manual nature of this process is not ideal, so you should consider using the Path View in addition to the browser view. The path view contains simply the next page in sequence viewed by the visitors, and does not need to match this against a hyperlink on the screen. Therefore the clicks hidden behind JavaScript are always visible in the path view. DHTML Dynamic HTML means HTML that changes dynamically within the browser. Confusingly the term Dynamic Websites or Dynamic Scripting means something totally different (the ability for code running on the server to generate different pages). DHTML is most commonly used for dropdown menus as part of the navigation structure on a page. As the visitors moves the mouse around different menus become visible. ClickTracks does not display percentage bars for links that are not currently visible. If you cause a DHTML area to become visible you need to tell ClickTracks to parse the page again and display the newly visible links. Pressing F3 will do this. The Path View helps to simplify this problem since it shows all onward clicks from this page, without regard for whether the corresponding links are currently visible in the browser view. Don't forget the Path View The Path View shows the next page in sequence, even if that page cannot be found within the HTML. In many cases simply looking at the Path View is the easiest way to get to the data Hiding Link Reports Link reports in the Browser View are displayed when the % of visitors moving from the current page to the destination of the hyperlink is above the minimum specified in Navigation Report Options If there are simply too many link reports on a page you can turn them off individually using the F4 key. Move the mouse cursor over the link report in the Browser View and press F4. Press again and the report in that position will reappear. Alternatively, you can turn all the link reports on and off using the F7 key. Link reports can be made partially transparent so the underlying web page can be viewed. Press Control + Down Arrow to make link reports more transparent, and Control + Up Arrow to make them more opaque.

34 28 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Page Analysis View Page Analysis reports are shown to the right of the Browser View. It's a very powerful way of seeing how people react to the page as a whole. The top of the Page Analysis panel shows up to five different time periods for which data can be viewed, depending on. The actual start and end dates of the period are shown below this. Reports available Visitors that see this page The percentage of visitors that see this page any time during their visit, regardless of the order pages are visited. Visitors that see the page multiple times are counted once. Average time at this page Number of seconds spent looking at this page. Does not include those visits that end at this page because view time cannot be determined from the logfile. Average time to this page Number of seconds visitors are on the site before they reach this page for the first time. Visitors entered at this page Percentage of visitors that enter the site here. Exits from this page (as % of page views) Visitors that leave the site after seeing this page, expressed as a percentage of those that visit the page. Clicking any of the above icons also acts as a shortcut to create a new label with the appropriate criterion. See Labeling Visitors Top Search Keywords (Optimizer only) These are the most common keywords searched on by visitors who entered the site at this page Date Periods Robot visit summary (Optimizer only) the dates of the most recent visit from robots. Page Analysis reports can be viewed for five different time periods. This is very useful when you want to understand how behavior changes over time. The five time periods are: All dates The reports span the entire range of dates chosen for analysis.

35 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 29 Day Data for only the most recent day in the date range is displayed. By default this single day report is turned off. You can enable this from the Options Dialog. Week The 'Week' period shows the most recent seven days in the date range, with each day broken out separately. Month The 'Month' period shows the most recent five weeks in the selected date range, with each week broken out separately. Weeks always begin on Sunday and end on Saturday, so the last week may only represent a partial week. If your date range is not five weeks long, some of the earlier weeks will be blank. Six months The 'Month' period shows the most recent five weeks in the selected date range, with each week broken out separately. Weeks always begin on Sunday and end on Saturday, so the last week may only represent a partial week. If your date range is not five weeks long, some of the earlier weeks will be blank. You can switch between the different time periods by clicking the tabs at the top of the report. The dates within each period are determined from the overall range of dates being analyzed. See Selecting date range or Show me how How Page Analysis Reports Are Calculated Visitors that see this page The percentage of visitors that see this page any time during their visit, regardless of the order pages are visited. Visitors that see the page multiple times are counted once. Visitors that see this page at least once / Total number of visitors within time period. A bigger bar or higher percentage indicates this page is seen by most visitors. Smaller bar indicates the page is seen by fewer visitors. Page Analysis reports are based on visitor sessions, not clicks nor unique visitors. See How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session Average time at this page Number of seconds spent looking at this page. Does not include those visits that end at this page. Average time in seconds people spend viewing this page. Indicates if the page is really read or is simply a jumping off point for other pages. Average time to this page Number of seconds visitors are on the site before they reach this page for the first time. Average time it takes people to reach this page. Longer times indicate a deep page or potentially a problem in navigation structure that makes the page hard to find. Visitors entered at this page Percentage of visitors that enter the site here. Number of visit sessions that start at this page / Total number of visitors within time period. Indicates if an unusually high percentage of visitors are entering the site at this page

36 30 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Exits from this page (as % of page views) Visitors that leave the site after seeing this page, expressed as a percentage of those that visit the page. The exit rate. Unlike the entry page or visit page figures above, this value is calculated based on hits and not visits (in other words, it uses the same method of counting as the Browser View). The report works like to ensure the figure is a reasonable percentage for all pages. Basing the calculated on visits yields a high value for the home page (since most visitors exit from there) and a very small percentage for all other pages (since visitor exit randomly from other pages). A click based percentage makes the value easier to interpret. on. Top Search Keywords The most common keywords that visitors who landed on this page searched This is the same number you'd see if you created a label for visitors who entered the site at this page and then viewed the Search Report for that label. Robot visits The number of times the page has been visited by robots during the last six weeks Path View The Path View is displayed in the lower panel of the ClickTracks window. Each box in the view represents a web page. The central box at the top represents the current page seen in the Browser View. Boxes to the left represent the previous page that was seen before the current page. Boxes to the right represent pages that are seen after the current page. (The data on the right is the same data that is shown in the link reports in the Browser View, but placed in order of frequency rather than laid out on the page). You can click on the URLs to jump to that page. The box on the right highlighted in red represents the number of visitors who exited the site at this page. The thickness of the arrow indicates the relative number of visitors taking the path. In addition the boxes are ordered so that the most common paths are at the top, with gradually less frequent paths below this. Referrers from external sites are often the most important types of visitors to a site and consequently ClickTracks highlights them with a blue bar at the top of the box representing the referring page. Each box can contain the following icons:

37 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 31 Visitors are being referred from this external site. Typical examples are search engines and advertising partners. Additional information on referrers is available by clicking the 'Info' icon. The list presented shows the parameter list and frequency of occurrence for specific parameter values. This can help identify which search parameters are most popular, for example. Significant numbers of visitors enter the site directly at this page. Significant numbers of visitors leave site directly from this page. You can click on these three icons to create a label of the corresponding type. See Labeling Visitors for more information. Similarly, the icon is used to label visitors that see that page. It appears in all pages How Path View Reports Are Calculated Left side The left side of the path view shows the previous page in sequence. Each number represents : Number of clicks from that page to current page / number of clicks (hits) on current page. Right side The right side of Path View actually uses the same calculations as the Browser View. Since exiting is a valid action users can take, the % bars include this in the denominator. Each percentage bar is: (clicks from current->target) / (clicks from current to another internal page + exits from current) Path View Reports are based on clicks, not visitors or unique visitors Why percentages sometimes don't add up to 100% Sometimes the percentages in the Path View add up to less than 100%. The most common reasons are: 1. Sometimes a visitor clicked a link from one page to itself. These are not displayed on the Path View, although you can see them on the Link Reports in the Browser View. 2. The activity for the link is below the Path Display Threshold. See Configuration Options for how to lower the threshold or Show me how 3. Even if the level of activity is above the Path Display Threshold, ClickTracks limits the number of boxes shown in the Path View. This limit defaults to 15 and can changed in Configuration Options or Show me how 4. Some visitors arrive at the site without a referrer, and these are not displayed anywhere on the left hand side of the Path View. These may represent visitors who book marked the site or typed the URL into their browser, or they may just be visitors whose browsers don't send referrer data How The Navigation Numbers Are Calculated How The Link Reports Are Calculated

38 32 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer How Page Analysis Reports Are Calculated How Path View Reports Are Calculated 5.2 Search Report The Search Report shows the originating keywords used by each visitor in total and broken down by each search engine. In the table each cell has a blue color that is darker when more visits originate from that term. It is therefore possible to see at a glance the most significant search terms for your site, as well as which ones are under performing: Look for contrast In all variants of the search engine report the key thing is to look for areas of high contrast. The blue shading is designed to highlight cells that are unusually light or dark in color. These hotshots in the data are where you can most easily make improvements to your site or campaigns. Displaying different data As well as showing the raw number of visitors, the Search Report can show various other data. You can change what is shown by using either the icons or the drop-down menu near the top-right of the page. The choices are: Search Engine Parameters Useful definitions Search term: The original words entered by the visitor into the search engine. Also known as search keywords. URL parameters: the part of a URL to the right of the? character, usually of the form 'name=value' SEO: Search Engine Optimization. The process of defining the site goals and the associated search terms PPC: Pay Per Click. Online advertising mechanism whereby the advertiser pays for each click that brings a visitor to the site. Especially popular for paid listings in search engines. Search parameters

39 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 33 A visitor searching for 'Hawaiian pineapple' at Google enters the search term, clicks the submit button, and through the miracle of the search engine sees a list of results. The URL in the browser toolbar for the results page looks something like this: Notice that the original search term is encoded in the parameter named q. When the user clicks on a URL in the list of results they are taken to the appropriate site. During this process the referring URL is sent to the site. In fact the referrer is sent with every request from browser to server, but it's especially useful in the case of search engines because it reveals the original search string from the visitor. The parameter name used by different search engines varies, and the meaning of the other parameters is unpredictable at best. You can see a breakdown of these other parameters and their values in the Referrer Details window. ClickTracks examines the search terms for known search engines. Since there is no accepted standard for the names and meaning of each parameter in the referrer, ClickTracks contains a list of search engines and the corresponding name of the parameter that contains the search term. See Search Engine Parameters & Keywords for more information. Search Report details Search Report Configuration Seeing more rows or search engine columns By default the search engine report show 10 engines and 50 search terms. You can easily expand either from Options or Show me how Adding extra search engines ClickTracks ships with a large number of search engines predefined. You may find you want to add additional engines for your specific needs by editing SearchEngines.txt. See Search Engine Parameters & Keywords Seeing individual search domains By default ClickTracks aggregates.co.uk,.de,.com etc. for common search engines into a single domain, and converts all search terms to lower case. Sometimes you might want to view each of these country specific search engines individually to gain a better understanding of how visitors from different countries use search terms in different ways. You can change this in Options or Show me how How Search Engine Reports Are Calculated Number of visitors shows how many visitors came from a particular search term on a particular search engine. Visitors as percentages shows the number of visitors for each search term, as a percentage of the total number of visitors from that search engine. Total cost shows the total cost of your pay-per-click campaigns for a particular search term on a particular search engine. Cost per visitor shows you the average cost per visitor of your pay-per-click campaigns for that search term and search engine. This shows you who are the most expensive visitors to bring in. If you are using ClickTracks Pro, you can compare this with the revenue from the same visitors to see if they are also your most valuable visitors.

40 34 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Proportion of short visits shows the percentage of visitors who spent less than five seconds on your site. This generally indicates that they reached the landing page but then left immediately. If this number is high, it indicates that something is wrong with your ad or with the landing page. Does the landing page deliver what the ad promised? Is it easy to navigate to the rest of site from there? If these are pay-per-click visitors, you are paying for them, but they are not getting past the first page. Deliver what they are looking for, or else change your ad text or keywords to promise only what you can deliver. Reports that include cost of visitors ( ) are only available after configuring campaigns. Only searches are shown The main table of the Search Engine report shows only those visitors that performed a search. It does not include other clicks from, for example, the directory section of Google. It also shows the actual search term as typed by the user and not the PPC term purchased. It's The Referring Search Engine, Not The PPC Source Columns show the search engine the user typed the search into. Thus Google PPC clicks can appear in the AOL column. If you want number of clicks according to the PPC source (campaign in ClickTracks) use the Campaign Report Totals Each search engine column contains a total. This total is for all the searches from the engine, and probably includes rows that are not displayed in the report. If you really want to manually add the rows to confirm ClickTracks is capable of basic arithmetic, click 'more rows' to expand the number. You may need to make it very large. Definition of visitors A visitor count ( ) is the number of visitors not the unique visitors. Unique visitors is not useful in search analysis because it would not count the same visitor coming to the site, leaving, searching again and coming back within a short time. This happens in the real world, so visitors is the correct fundamental unit that should be counted. Definition of cost A report that shows cost ( ) counts the cost from the corresponding campaign in the Campaign Manager. The cost of a visitor is extracted from this data based on the landing page + tracking parameters and is then mapped against the original search term automatically Content Targeted Ads Report Google Content Targeted Ads (AdSense) display Google paid placements on non search sites. The Google engine seeks out pages with large sites that contain content related to the keywords purchased through AdWords and displays the same ad copy and clickthrough URL. The result is a large number of sites carrying the ad. The Content Targeted Ads Report details the referring URL or domain for the site carrying the ad.

41 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 35 In the example above the referring pages have been collapsed into just the domain, which gives a useful overview of the types of sites that are carrying the ads. The default is to display the entire referring URL. This can be changed from the Options dialog Tracking Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Tracking PPC data is covered in detail in the chapter Analysis of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns 5.3 Site Overview The Site Overview shows the big picture of your website. The reports are arranged in simple columns to make comparing different groups of visitors easier. We'll cover this type of comparative analysis in a later section, so for now we'll just examine what type of data each report tells us: Total number of visitors Page Views per visitor OR Total Page Views (Options setting) Cost of Visitors Average time on the site Search keywords, averaged across all search engines (A more detailed search report is available in Search Report). Internal Search Report, customizable name, lists most frequent requests of a given parameter or cookie

42 36 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Most significant referring sites. Additional information on referrers can obtained by clicking the icon. See 'Referrer Details' Pages with the most visitors Most significant entry pages Most significant exit pages. Note: this report is turned off by default and can be turned on from Options. Set the number of rows to 10 or 20. Setting this to 0 again turns off the report. Date Ranges Most significant countries You can see the Site Overview in a wide range of date ranges including: All dates Today Yesterday This week total This week by day last week total Last week by day This month total This month by week This month by day Last month total Last month by week Last month by day This quarter total This quarter by week This quarter by month Last quarter total Last quarter by week Last quarter by month This year total This year by month Last 12 months by month You can also select any custom date range to display through the calendar tool. The dates within each period are determined from the overall range of dates being analyzed. See Selecting date range or Show me how How Site Overview Reports Are Calculated Total number of visitors The number of visitor sessions in the time period. Some other analytics tools refer to this number as 'sessions'. See How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session Page Views per visitor The number of pages each visitor sees within a single session. Higher values when combined with a long visit length indicate users read lots of content. High values with short visit length indicate visitors

43 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 37 are clicking around but not reading. Average time on the site Time in seconds visitors spend on the site. Search keywords, Averaging across all search engines this report shows the popular search keywords. The Search Report provides a breakdown of keyword by engine, but cannot show trends over time. This report can make such trends easier to spot. Most significant referring sites. The number of visitors that were at an external site before clicking through into your site. By definition 'external' sites are those not listed in Alternate Domain Names. Additional information on referrers can obtained by clicking the icon. See 'Referrer Details' Pages with the most visitors Pages that are most often seen by visitors. Multiple views of the same page are not counted if they occur within the same session. Most significant entry pages Most common entry points to the site. Most significant exit pages Pages that are most likely to be an exit point Internal Search report This is a configurable report that allows you to see the most frequently requested values for any given parameter or cookie. You simply select the cookie or parameter and the report will calculate the occurrences of each value. The name is assigned since it can measure a wide range of things. The default name is Internal Search Report because a common use of this report is to track the search terms visitors type into a search form on your website. (Optimizer only) Most significant countries

44 38 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer The map uses a GeoIP database to determine the country where visitors are coming from. This is far more accurate than the old method of examining the domain name of the visitor (.com,.edu,.fr,.co.jp etc. ). The map is shaded so countries are darker when they have more visitors 5.4 Campaign, sales and ROI Report The Campaign Report shows a list of all your ad campaigns, how much they each cost, and in ClickTracks Professional the revenues associated with them. To use the Campaign Report, you first have to configure your campaigns by clicking on the described in the next section. icon. This is When you have configured your campaigns, the Campaign Report will list for each campaign, the number of visitors from that campaign, and how much it cost to attract them. It also shows the same statistics for visitors who did not come from any campaign.

45 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates Configuring Campaigns ClickTracks can track your ad campaigns, and report the number of visitors from each, the cost of those visitors, and the total revenue they generated. Organizing your ad campaigns ClickTracks recognizes which visitors came from which ad campaigns by their landing page, that is, the page which they first arrived at on your website. So in order to distinguish between your different campaigns, you must make sure that each campaign has a different landing page. The most convenient way to do this, and the way recommended by both Overture and Google, is to put extra parameters, called tracking parameters, on the end of the landing page URL. For example, suppose that bobsfruitsite.com has several Google AdWords campaigns. Instead of making them all land at the home page, it would be better to make them each land at a page with distinctive parameters, for example By ensuring that each campaign has unique tracking parameters, it is possible to know which visitor came from which campaign, and thus measure how well each campaign is performing. See Zen And The Art Of Tracking Parameters Configuring your campaigns in ClickTracks You can tell ClickTracks about your ad campaigns by selecting Configure Ad Campaigns from the Tools menu, or by clicking the icon in the Campaign Report. The Campaign Manager looks like this:

46 40 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Depending which version of ClickTracks you have, there may be two tabs along the top of the Campaign Manager (Google and Overture) or there may be three tabs (Google, Overture and Other). Google and Overture campaigns ClickTracks reads Google and Overture campaigns directly from the.csv spreadsheets supplied by those companies. It calculates all the parameters for you, so that you don't have to configure anything yourself. You can download the spreadsheets from the Google and Overture management consoles. You need to download the Ad Text Report ( then choose Summary Data ) from Google, and the Account Activity Detail spreadsheet (under the Reports tab) from Overture. Save the spreadsheet to disk, then click the Import button in the Campaign Manager to import the data directly into ClickTracks. For the results to be accurate, you should make sure that the spreadsheet and ClickTracks are using the same date range. You can change the date range of the spreadsheet when you download it from Google or Overture. Alternatively, you can change the date range which ClickTracks is analyzing using the toolbar. button on the Other campaigns If you have a version of ClickTracks with the Other tab in the Campaign Manager, you can also configure your own campaigns from other search engines or partner sites. To add a single campaign, click the New button to create a new campaign. Then enter the data about your campaign into the fields in the table: Name Type Landing page Cost Choose any convenient name for your campaign Choose CPC if you pay a cost per click, or Total Cost if you pay a fixed amount or per impression Enter the landing page for the ad, including the tracking parameters. Enter the cost per click for a CPC campaign, or the total cost for a Total Cost campaign To import multiple campaigns, you will need to have a comma separated value (.csv) file with campaign data to be imported. This file must be specifically formatted to match the ClickTracks import requirements. The format of the file must be followed correctly or it will not import into the Campaign Manager. The file must be in Unicode text format, NOT ANSI. Then the fields in the file should be setup as follows: 1. The first line in the file must be "ClickTracks Campaign" 2. Then 3 blank lines must follow 3. On the fifth line you should have a header line with the following tab delimited values: a. Headline b. Destination URL c. Clicks d. Avg CPC OR Total Cost * 4. On the sixth line you can begin your tab delimited data fields, with as many lines of data following this line * Depending on whether you enter "Avg CPC" or "Total Cost" in the fourth column of the.csv file, your campaign costs will be calculated accordingly. You can also base your campaigns on the existence of specific cookies instead of on the destination URL. In order to track campaigns by cookies, the "Destination URL" field should have date in the form: cookie:cookiename=value where COOKIENAME is the name of the cookie and VALUE is the value that indicates the specific campaign. These are cases sensitive. Landing page/tracking parameters Each campaign is identified solely from the landing page and tracking parameters. Careful planning and selection of these parameters during your advertising planning will pay off when you later analyze the data in ClickTracks.

47 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 41 The landing page+tracking parameters you enter must match exactly the URL the user will click through, A note about currencies ClickTracks doesn't know anything about currencies or exchange rates. All campaign costs and revenue calculations are currency neutral - it's just a number. For US based users the reports will contain a $ sign for convenience though it's important to understand this does not mean ClickTracks can only work in US dollars. In fact ClickTracks has no preference for any currency. If you're using ClickTracks Pro for ROI calculations you must make sure both your costs and sales are defined in the same currency, since ClickTracks can't use exchange rates to convert from one currency to another. It doesn't matter what the currency you use is, as long as it's the same for both costs and sales Importing Google And Overture Campaigns Google and Overture Campaign Tracking To analyze your Google and Overture campaigns, you'll need to: 1. make sure there is a tracking parameter for each clickthrough URL 2. export a CSV file from your campaign provider 3. import that file into ClickTracks. Adding a Tracking Parameter to landing page URLs Tracking parameters provide a way to identify the source campaign, if any, of each web site visitor. You will need to edit the landing page URL, adding a question mark, a tracking parameter, the equals sign, and then the value to identify the source, for example For more precise results, you can add additional tracking parameters for the particular campaign, ad group, and creative. For example, Adding the additional parameters is optional, and only necessary if you want to group your campaigns or creatives for analysis. With just a single parameter to indicate the source, ClickTracks can provide campaign visitor information broken down by keyword. To edit the destination URL in Google, log into your account, select the campaign, and then the ad group of the ad you want to track. Click 'Edit' below the ad. To edit the destination URL in Overture, log into your account, and select 'manage listings.' Place a check mark next to the search term you want to track, then click 'edit listings.' A window will pop up which will allow you to edit. Click 'Modify Listings. Using these parameters will most likely not affect the function of your site. If your web pages are dynamically generated, meaning they use parameters in the URLs, check with your webmaster to make sure adding these tracking parameters won't cause any problems. After your tracking parameter has been set, you'll need wait at least a day or two for some activity to come through these new URLs. For more information, please see Zen And The Art Of Tracking Parameters Download the PPC Report To import your campaign data into ClickTracks, you'll need to export the TSV (for Google) or CSV (for Overture) file from your campaign management console. When you do this, be sure to set the date range to the time period you wish to analyze. It's important that this date range matches the range of dates for which you will be doing analysis in ClickTracks. In Google, log into your account, and select 'Reports.' Click on 'Ad Text Report.' The view should be set to "Summary data." Select the date range, and then select 'Downloadable.' Click 'Create Report,' and the download will begin. Click 'Save'. In Overture, go to 'reports,' and select 'account activity detail.' Select your date range, click 'Match Type View,' and click 'Create Report.' Then, click 'spreadsheet' and the download will begin. Click 'save.' Campaign Report Import Once you've downloaded your CSV file, open the Campaign Report in ClickTracks, and click 'configure campaigns.' then import the CSV file you just generated.

48 42 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Overture Tracking URLs Overture can be configured to append its own tracking parameters to the end of each URL. These parameters are OVKEY, OVRAW and OVMTC. They are useful in refining analysis of campaigns and greatly simplify the problem of creating unique tracking parameters for each campaign. The problem Unfortunately the Overture tracking parameters do not appear in the URLs that are imported via the CSV file. Although the parameters are part of the clickthrough URL, ClickTracks doesn't see this from the CSV file because Overture doesn't output them to it. Without knowing these tracking parameters there's no way for ClickTracks to match them against the incoming requests. Solution In Overture you will need to use a manually entered tracking parameter, or multiple parameters. The OVKEY etc simply gets ignored Campaigns Available in Optimizer Only ClickTracks features direct integration with several marketing service providers (ESPs), including SubscriberMail, Intellicontact, and Inwise. This provides a one-click method to import the campaign data and get conversion data at the level of the individual link within the , the overall mailing or all mailings within the range of analysis. The integration with ESPs is driven through an open system of simple CSV files. Importing the campaign into ClickTracks is easy and automates the identification of: The unique ID of the mailing. This is appended into the hyperlink of each message by the ESP and ensures users are tied back to the correct mailer no matter how much time elapses before the click through. The unique ID of each hyperlink in the mail body. Unique ID assigned to each recipient The date of the mailing The campaign import wizard automates all this. Exporting user IDs The incoming links from the campaigns include a unique ID that is tied to the recipient. This ID can be extracted during analysis and matched against certain criteria, such as visitors that spent more than 20 second looking at DVD players. This list of IDs can then be fed back into the marketing system and a follow-up sent to those users offering an additional discount on DVD players. Before exporting the user IDs you'll want to create a label or combination of labels that describe the criteria your users should meet. This will most likely be based on details such as clicked into a certain URL, or the inverse, combined with spent x seconds on the site. Once the labels are created you can export the visitor IDs into a CSV file for import into your marketing system, which will transform the IDs back to the actual address Currencies Other Than US Dollars ClickTracks is not specifically designed for any single currency - it works equally well with all. If your currency is US dollars then any report dealing with cost or revenue will pre pend a $ to each. For all other currencies ClickTracks leaves off the currency symbol, showing just the raw numbers. You need to ensure the currency of your campaign costs matches that of your revenue tracking if you're using ClickTracks Professional to track revenue. ClickTracks does not convert between different currencies. Everything is treated as a simple number.

49 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates Referrer Details The referrer details window appears when the icon is clicked in a report. It provides additional information on external referring pages and parameters and is sometimes useful in advanced analysis of parameters such as the language used in a search. By default some of the more unusual data in the window is not shown. You can enable display of this from Options, but doing so will increase calculation times. See Options:Referrer Parameter Details The left-hand panel shows the list of referring sites sending traffic, grouped by domain name. The list can be sorted alphabetically or by the number of referred visitors within the selected calendar period. By default the domain names for popular search engines are aggregated together so and images.google.fr area under the single heading 'Google'. See Aggregate Search Engine Statistics for more information. For known search engines, the search parameter is highlighted with the icon. This is only shown for search engines that are defined in the configuration. See Search Engine Keywords for more information. The list can be expanded to show individual parameters sent from the referrer in the right-hand panel. This shows the actual search keywords entered by the visitors, and the frequency of that search term among the visitors reaching your site. By default, the individual search keywords are not shown, in order to improve the performance of ClickTracks. You can turn them on from the right-hand panel, or in the Options dialog. The 'Label Referrer' button can be used to identify visitors from the selected referring domain, and display data about those visitors separately. The domain or page can be selected as the label criteria, or a specific search parameter such as the keyword can be chosen from the right pane. See Labeling Visitors and Referrer Labels for more information. See also: Search Engine Keywords Showing Referring Parameter Values By default the values of incoming referrer details are not shown. You can enable display of this from Options, but doing so will increase calculation times. See Options:Referrer Parameter Details

50 44 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 5.6 Robot Report The robot report is new in ClickTracks Optimizer and Professional, version 5.5. It's not available in Analyzer. Note also that the report is not available with JavaScript data sources (ClickTracks Hosted and JDC) since this method of data collection does not track robots. The robot report shows how frequently search engine robots are visiting your site. Search engines use automatic software known as robots, spiders, crawlers or just bots, to crawl millions of pages on the web. In so doing they extract the text and build the index of pages and search keywords. The first step in getting your site well ranked in the engines for the keywords that matter is to get the search robots to crawl your site, and from then on you'll want to pay close attention to which pages and how frequently the robots visit. The robot report shows this is single view that is quick and intuitive. The report shows a list of pages on your site and adjacent to this a column for each search engine robot. The value in each cell is a specific metric for that page or a total for the engine in the column header. Note that many sites share a robot so you won't see all the individual search engines listed, but instead the robot name. For example Ask Jeeves and Teoma use the same robot but are distinct search engines when viewed in the search engine report. The pages are sorted top-to-bottom in the order of popularity of visits by humans. In general you will be most concerned with robots indexing the pages that are most frequently seen by people visiting the site, since those are the pages where you will focus your efforts in creating compelling text and page layout. A special case is made for robots.txt which is not normally seen by human visitors. This file is very important for SEO work and is therefore displayed at the top of the list. The metrics in the report are: Recency

51 The Reports ClickTracks Calculates 45 Number of days elapsed since robot visited. Most recent pages are darker blue, pages visited weeks ago are lighter blue while those visited never are the lightest Frequency Actual date of last robot visit. Number of times in the selected time interval the robots have visited (see below) How frequently robots visit each page. Date range The top of the report shows the date range under analysis for robots. This range is fixed to the most recent 10 weeks from the end date of the date range selected, or the range of dates imported, whichever is sooner. Page errors Note that ClickTracks does not show pages with 404 errors in the robot report How The Robot Report is Calculated Robots are detected from the logfile based on their user agent, not the IP. This works well for the large, public search engine spiders. The list of the user agent strings is maintained in the text file SearchEngineRobots.txt within the data directory under the installed location. The concept of session and session timeout parameters are not used with robots because a single crawl from Google might take several hours to crawl the site. The start of the session is measured from the request for robots.txt instead.

52 Exporting Reports

53 Exporting Reports 47 6 Exporting Reports In many instances it's useful to export the reports from ClickTracks to a form that can be viewed independently of the application. Exported reports make it easy to: reports to other team members. Keep archived reports from old versions of the site for historical comparisons Upload to another server for intranet use. Export to PDF Export to Excel 6.1 Export to PDF Export to PDF When exporting to a PDF document while in the Navigation Report you can elect to include any of the three views in the panels. All views are combined into a single document, making it easy to the document to other team members. 6.2 Export to Excel Export to Excel ClickTracks is able to export all the reports into a preformatted Excel spreadsheet, suitable for further analysis and number crunching. The PC where ClickTracks is installed must also have Excel 2000 or greater installed. During the export process a direct connection is established between ClickTracks and Excel and the document is automatically generated and opened. The spreadsheet contains the original values and a series of charts linked to them. Bringing in other data or connecting this output to other spreadsheets is therefore easy.

54 Real World Analysis Examples

55 Real World Analysis Examples 49 7 Real World Analysis Examples Analysis of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns Goal Page Analysis 7.1 Analysis of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns ClickTracks is a very powerful tool for measuring the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns. By observing the behavior of visitors who clicked each keyword or campaign, you can make the best possible use of your advertising budget. You can focus on the keywords and phrases that not only bring a lot of visitors, but ones that bring the most interested and qualified visitors - those visitors likely to make a purchase. Set Up Your Campaigns In order for ClickTracks to be able to recognize that a visitor came from a certain campaign, a tracking parameter needs to appear in the landing URL for that campaign. For instance, instead of setting a campaign landing page to simply the home page: you would add an additional parameter, like so: Unless your web site is specifically programmed otherwise, the additional parameter will have no effect on the operation of your site. The page that is displayed will be exactly the same. The difference is that '?source=google' can be used by ClickTracks to recognize this visitor as coming from a Google campaign. Parameters are added in parameter/value pairs. In the above case, the parameter is 'source' and the value is 'google.' It actually does not matter what the parameter and/or value are, as long as there is a unique combination of parameter and value in the landing URL for each online campaign. (For more sophisticated tracking beyond ClickTracks' automatic campaign tracking, it might be valuable to be sure to use sensible parameters and values. See 'Visitor Labeling' for more information.) So, you might have all your campaigns' landing pages set to your home page, but each with a different tracking parameter. In this case, the parameter is always the same ('source') but the value changes ('google1','google2...). This is the most common scheme for tracking URLs: Note that using separate values ('google1','google2'...) is only necessary if you want to examine that campaign together as a group. If you're simply buying keywords on Google, and you want to see the activity per keyword, you can set all of the tracking parameters to 'source=google' - ClickTracks does not need to use the tracking parameter to determine which keyword or phrase was used. Typically you would use a different parameter or value for each separate ad (creative) you're running, so you can compare their effectiveness. Import the Data Into ClickTracks You can configure ClickTracks to analyze your campaigns by downloading a report from your campaign provider, and importing it into ClickTracks. It's important that the date range of the downloaded report matches the range of dates you want to analyze in ClickTracks. In Google, log into your account, and select 'Reports.' Click on 'Ad Text Report.' The view should be set to "Summary data." Select the date range, and then select 'Downloadable.' Click 'Create Report,' and the download will begin. In Overture, go to 'reports,' and select 'Account Activity Detail.' Select the date range, click 'Match Type View,'

56 50 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer and then click 'Create Report.' Finally, click 'spreadsheet' and the download will begin. Once you've downloaded your report, start ClickTracks, and open the Campaign Report. Then click the button marked 'Configure Campaigns.' A dialog box will appear that will allow you to import your campaign report. Click the 'Google' or 'Overture' tab, depending on the type of campaign, and click 'Import' to import the file. Each campaign will appear on a separate line. If more than one campaign shares the same exact landing URL, they will be grouped into one campaign in ClickTracks. What Happens After My Campaigns Bring Visitors? Once you've imported your reports into ClickTracks, there are many ways that you can analyze and interpret the data. The Campaign Report will show the cost and number of visitors for each campaign. If you're using ClickTracks Professional, and you've configured the Revenue Options, the Campaign Report will also display the revenue resulting from each campaign. How Do Keywords and Search Engines Compare? By looking at the search report, you can gauge the effectiveness of individual keywords and search engines. By default, the Search Report shows the number of visitors each keyword and search engine brought to the site. Within the grid, you can see each keyword's performance separately for each search engine. Cells are shaded darker to indicate higher numbers - the contrast draws your eye to areas where there are large differences. Suppose you see from the contrast of cell shade that one search engine is greatly outperforming others on a given keyword. This would indicate that the keyword is effective (visitors are searching on it, and finding your site), but perhaps not listed well on some other search engines. Modifying your site to improve your ranking for this keyword might be in order. Also, this might be a keyword worth purchasing. How Interested Are They? By clicking the buttons at the top, you can see not only how many visitors each keyword brought, but also the total and average cost for each keyword (this option only appears after you've imported campaign reports). In ClickTracks Professional, you can also select total and average revenue. You can benefit from examining how long the visitors from each search engine and keyword combination spent on the site. You can do this by selecting either 'average time on site' or 'percentage of short visits.' A keyword might bring a lot of visitors to your site, but if they don't find what they were looking for, then they will move on quickly. By seeing which keywords keep visitors on the site the longest, you can estimate how interested in your products or services those visitors are. Separating Pay-Per-Click from Traditional Search In order to analyze visitors from pay-per-click campaigns separately from visitors from traditional searches, select the Label Wizard, and click the Traditional Search vs PPC button. Two new visitor labels will be created, one representing traditional search visitors, and the other representing visitors from your PPC campaigns. This feature will work only after you have imported your campaigns. These visitor labels will be available in all the reports. The Search Report will now show separate information for traditional search vs paid search. By comparing the performance of a given keyword between PPC and traditional search, you may find that some search terms are bringing a lot of visitors in traditional search, but paid listings for those same terms are not. This might indicate that the ad you created for users to click on is not communicating your message effectively. What Do They Really Want?

57 Real World Analysis Examples 51 On the Navigation Report, the Visitor Labels allow you to easily compare the behavior of traditional search visitors with paid search visitors. By looking for differences in the number of clicks on each link, you see how these different visitors react to each page. The Site Overview will now have two additional columns, again, one for traditional search, and one for paid search. You can compare, for instance, the most visited page, or the pages with the highest exit rate, and see how they differ between traditional vs paid visitors. All This and More Suppose you want to examine the specific behavior of those visitors who came from a certain campaign, and also reached a certain goal page on your site. First, make a visitor label for someone who came from the campaign: Open the Label Wizard, and click "Ad Campaign Tracking." From the drop-down menu, select the campaign you want to track. Once this label is created, create a second one by opening the Label Wizard and selecting 'advanced labeling.' Select "Visited a Certain Page," and choose your desired goal page from the menu. Click "Next," and then from the "parent label" menu under "advanced options," select the label for visitors from a certain campaign that you made previously. Now, this new label will show visitors that met both criteria: those who came from a certain campaign, and reached a certain goal page. You can use this label to examine how these particular visitors behave. See also Zen And The Art Of Tracking Parameters 7.2 Goal Page Analysis There are likely one or more actions on your site which you are particularly interested in enticing your visitors to perform, such as filling out an online form, making a purchase, downloading a demo, viewing an online movie, or simply visiting a certain page or section of the site. ClickTracks makes it easy to see how the behavior of visitors who perform these actions differs from visitors who do not. For instance, you may want to find out if visitors who filled out a certain online form are also browsing a lot of pages in the products section of the site. Who Are Your Most Important Visitors? In ClickTracks, you can create a visitor label that represents visitors that reach a certain goal page. Select the task wizard, and click "Reached Checkout or Other Goal." On the next page of the wizard, select your desired goal page. You can select any page of your site from the drop-down menu. Open the Task Wizard : Click Reached Goal Page then select your target page. If you're interested in visitors that filled out an online form, you'll want to select the confirmation or thank-you page that visitors receive after completing the form (otherwise you'd be counting all the people who viewed the form, including those who did not fill it out or finish filling it out). For visitors who made a purchase, you'd select the purchase confirmation page.

58 52 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer What Interests Them Most? Once you've created a visitor label, it will appear on all of the reports. The Navigation Report will show the percentage of visitors who clicked on each link, both for visitors in general, and also for these separated visitors (who reached the purchase confirmation page). For any page of your site, you can see how the reaction of these visitors differs from visitors in general. Suppose you've labeled visitors that reach your checkout confirmation page (purchasing visitors). By looking at the navigation report, you might see that a lot of visitors are clicking from your home page to your white papers section. However, you might, by looking at the visitor label for purchasing visitors, find that your actual customers are not clicking links to the white papers section nearly as much as visitors in general. So, white papers might not be as important to selling your product as you might have thought, even though they may have been receiving a lot of page views. Using this type of information, you can spend your time and energy improving parts of the site that matter to purchasing visitors. How Did They Get Here? The Search Report will show, in addition to information about visitors in the general, the search engines and search terms that these purchasing visitors used. By looking at the Search Report information for your actual purchasing visitors, you can see which keywords are driving the most sales. Bringing visitors to your site is not enough. In order for a keyword to perform well, it needs to produce qualified customers. When you create a visitor label, a separate grid appears in the Search Report with for that label. If you select "Combine Tables," then all separate grids for each label are combined into one table. This can be useful for close comparison. How Do They Compare? The Site Overview will show a separate column for purchasing visitors, with data about the top entry and exit pages, referrers, and average time on site. Using this report, you can compare information about purchasing visitors with information about visitors in general. By comparing the top referrers to your site, you'll see which referrers are resulting in the most sales. For instance, there may be a referrer that's very popular for visitors in general, but not for purchasing visitors. This would mean that even though that referrer brought a lot of visitors, it did not bring a lot of actual revenue. Also look at the most visited pages for purchasing visitors. You'll find the pages that are most important to purchasers of your product, or pages that successfully sell your product. By comparison, you might find some pages that are very popular to visitors in general, but that don't play a large roll in converting visitors to buyers. What's Important To Them Is Important To You Your site may have a lot of visitors for various reasons. Many of them will simply glance at a page or two and then move on. Others might be casually interested in what you do, but not in a position to purchase your product. There may be a lot of data available about pages that these visitors visit most, and the referrers that bring them, but these visitors are not fundamental to your business they are visitors that happen to visit your site, but will never go further than that. And you don't need to limit your inquiry to only one type of visitor. You can create a number of visitor labels, and see data for each label in all the ClickTracks reports. By focusing directly on visitors that matter to you - whether that means filling out an online form, purchasing a product, or downloading your demo - you can optimize your web site and search engine rank for those particular visitors: the ones who positively impact your bottom line.

59 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics

60 54 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 8 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics Web site analysis in the past yielded very superficial data, or required highly complex customized databases. The cause of the problem in both cases is simply the extremely large number of variants involved in the data. Put simply, web analytics is actually people analytics; you're looking at the behavior of people at your site. We only need look around the world to see that people behave in very complex and contradictory ways. Analysis of data with such wide ranging variables is notoriously complex. Traditional web analytics solved the problem of complexity by eliminating it, reducing the countless ways visitors move around websites into a basic list of top pages, top referrers etc. This basic list of stats provided marketers with some idea of events taking place on the site, but without any way to correlate the data derived from the referrer to, for example, a breakdown the pages seen by those referred visitors. Each set of stats lived in a separate world. The second solution to the complexity was to develop expensive, highly customized systems that could establish the above correlations but only by loading databases full of very customized information. Since even a large and powerful computer cannot handle everything from the logfile simultaneously, the data must be optimized when loaded initially. This requires extensive custom development and programming, resulting in expensive software that needs constant tweaking and updating. Having done this the data is then loaded in such a way that it cannot be correlated in a different way. The optimization process is one-way and cannot be changed if the different data needs to be extracted. ClickTracks combines the best of both approaches using a unique system. The default reports show behavior for the average visitor but can be modified on-the-fly to show comparative analysis of different groups or types. Thus a simple report of search engine keywords is available within seconds, and a more complex report of the keywords used by visitors that later see a coupon page can be generated in a few minutes. Divide and conquer The system used by ClickTracks to divide visitors is named Visitor Labeling. Internally ClickTracks will attach a colored label to a visitor if they meet a certain criterion, such as they were referred from a particular site. The label sticks with the visitor for the entire time they are part of the site analysis, so it's easy to label visitors and see if they later reach a certain page (or more importantly if one group is more likely than another to reach a certain page) Labeling is designed to facilitate side-by-side comparisons of different groups. You'll see some reports like the site overview are formatted to make such comparisons very easy, with a column for each labeled group. Labels can in theory be used to examine a single individual visitor, though that's not what they're intended for. Examining individual visitors rarely produces statistically sound data. Labels can also be combined together in AND and OR relationships, so intersections of different groups becomes possible. Remember: comparisons produce the best data Knowing the most popular page on the website seems very useful the first few times you use ClickTracks. You'll quickly discover however that this metric is rarely significant on its own. Far more useful is to examine the most popular page for two groups of visitors side-by-side. Choose these groups wisely and you'll be amazed at the depth and quality of decisions you can make. 8.1 Visitor Labeling: The Way Of ClickTracks

61 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics 55 The fundamental mechanism in ClickTracks is to 'label' visitor groups. The term 'label' stems from the idea that you will identify a group of visitors based on some criteria, and that those visitors will be identified by the color of their label, wherever they go within the site. All the reports in ClickTracks are broken down by label. It is therefore possible to determine the search keyword that results in purchases (by labeling the visitors that see the purchase page) and the advertising campaign producing most visitors (by labeling the visitors referred from that campaign) as well as many other complex analysis scenarios. The Task Wizard greatly simplifies the process of identifying the business analysis to be performed, and the related labeling criteria that are needed to present the information. To access the Task Wizard click the Labeling icon: or the equivalent in the main control screen: Using The Task Wizard Using The Label Wizard The Task Wizard contains several site analysis tasks that many site operators will want to perform. These serve as a starting point for more complex analysis that can be done with the Advanced Labeling wizard.

62 56 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Reached Goal Page Compare Search Engines Compare Se arch Referral s Traditional Search vs PPC Returning visitors Ad tracking Search vs Content Targeted Short Visit Length Before and Af ter The Task Wizard takes care of identifying the criteria, selecting a color for the label and running the analysis. All that remains for you to do is select the report and see how your labeled visitors behave Reached Goal Page Highlights visitors that reach a goal page - for example shopping cart checkout or newsletter sign up. Separates these visitors in all reports to reveal most effective search terms, referrer, navigation path etc. Overview: Many sites contain a single page that is ultimately the goal of the site. For ecommerce sites this is the checkout page. For content sites it might be a newsletter sign up page. How It Works: You will select from a menu the page that is the 'goal'. ClickTracks will locate every visitor session where the selected page is seen. All reports in ClickTracks will show these visitors in a different color. What to look for: The Search Report will indicate those searches that result in a purchase. Look at the Site Overview to see the best referring partner sites. The navigation reports will show how buyers are navigating your site Compare Search Engines Finds top 3 search engines for your site and highlights visitors from those in different colors, revealing visitor preferences and navigation patterns. Overview: Visitors from different search engines can exhibit significantly different behavior patterns. Using this

63 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics 57 option you will see a side-by-side comparison of the behavior patterns, entry pages etc. from each. How It Works: The referring URL tells ClickTracks the name of the search engine for each visitor. After determining the top 3 search engines for your site, ClickTracks creates a different colored label for each engine, and assigns a corresponding name. All reports will contain a color for each of the 3 engines, plus the standard green 'all visitors'. What to look for: Compare side-by-side entry pages, navigation paths and exit rates Compare Search Referrals Visitors referred to your site from all search engines (both traditional search and PPC) are highlighted. See navigation patterns and exit rates. Overview: Visitors searching for specific products or services tend to be very impatient. With so many other sites to choose from, it's hard to get them to stay at yours long enough to catch their attention. This label will identify those visitors coming from any search engine and color them distinctly. How It Works: ClickTracks examines the referring URL and compares it against a list of known search engines. Those visitors referred from matching domains are labeled. What to look for: Carefully note entry pages in the Site Overview, and exit rates from those pages. Your search referrals are the most important visitors. Make sure you're meeting their needs Traditional Search vs PPC Uses 2 colors to distinguish those visitors from traditional search and those from PPC, helping determine effectiveness of each. PPC tracking depends on the ad clickthrough URL containing a parameter. Overview: A visitor from a search engine might reach your site through traditional search results, or through a Pay-Per-Click ad. Optimizing for one or the other type of visitor can make a huge difference to your monthly ad spend and ROI. How It Works: Visitors coming to your site from a known search engine are divided into PPC and regular search. They are counted as PPC if they came from one of the ad campaigns defined in the ClickTracks Campaign Manager, otherwise they are counted as regular search This mechanism depends on you having configured all your campaigns in the Campaign Manager, otherwise some of the PPC visitors may be labeled as regular search. See Introduction to search engines for more information. What to look for: Search Report will reveal the best keywords in either case. Navigation patterns and number of visitors seeing certain pages will indicate the best keywords to buy or optimize for.

64 58 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Returning Visitors Highlights returning visitors to your site or other visitor groups that are identified by the presence of any persistent cookie Overview: Returning visitors are sometimes the most vital population to understand. If your site uses cookies that are stored for long periods in the visitors browser (persistent) and the logfile contains logged cookies, you can track these returning visitors. How It Works: ClickTracks looks for any cookie that is presented to the server on the entry page. Since the session for the visitor is new, the cookie must have been set in a previous visit. Cookies must be present in the server logfile. What to look for: Navigation patterns and pages seen for these most important visitors Ad Tracking Identifies visitors that click through an individual advertisement (banner, PPC etc) and highlights those visitors as they click deeper into the site. Overview: Select the advertisement and ClickTracks will identify all the visitors from this campaign. How It Works: You first need to configure your campaigns. Then you simply choose the campaign you are interested in from a list. ClickTracks identifies the visitors based on their landing page + tracking parameters. What to look for: Exit rates, navigation patterns and pages seen Search vs Content Targeted Overview: Content targeted AdWords are text ads from Google that show up in non-search pages, typically with content related to your keywords. Visitors clicking through on these ads have very different behavior due to the context in which the ads appear. How It Works: ClickTracks identifies the regular search PPC ads by checking for a tracking parameter. It looks only for the? character, so the actual parameter name and value do not matter. Content targeted ads are identified using the referrer string, which will be 'googlesyndication' This mechanism depends on a tracking parameter being set in each PPC ad. What to look for: Carefully examine the exit rates, and determine if content targeted ads are working for you.

65 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics Before And After Divides visitors into two groups Overview: Identifies those visitors that came to the site before a certain date and after. How It Works: ClickTracks simply creates two labels for these groups of visitors. What to look for: Set the date to the last time a search engine indexed your site (a couple of days after the spider visited to allow time for the index to update) and check for changes to keywords. After a major site redesign look for changes in the amount of time visitors spend on the site, and the number of pages clicked, as well as individual pages. After a PR campaign compare the referrers Short Visit Length Highlights visitors that leave immediately. Overview: Identifies those visitors with a short session length, usually indicating they touched a single page and then left. How It Works: ClickTracks calculates the length of each visit and identifies those of five seconds or less. (This is a more reliable measure of 'touched home page and left' than finding single-click visits, since redirect pages or framesets can cause a single click to appear as several clicks). What to look for: The Site Overview and Search Report will indicate the referrers and search terms that are producing visitors that leave quickly. Sometimes other site analysis tools provide a similar measure known as 'single click pages'. Using a visit length of less than 5 seconds provides a more complete view, and avoids the problem where visitors come through a redirect page before touching the final target page - effectively causing two clicks. 8.2 Advanced Visitor Labeling Every website is different and it's not possible for the Task Wizard to provide every available labeling option for all possible combinations. Sooner or later you'll want to use the Advanced Labeling Wizard to help spot the key behaviors specific to your site. A new label can be created at any time by clicking the menu next to the the Path View ( ) icon or by clicking the icons in Creating A New Label Creating A New Label Labels are created end edited using the New Label Wizard. Labels are usually created by clicking the icons within the Path View, in which case the wizard will contain default values on each page which merely need to be confirmed.

66 60 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Types of label: Referred from particular search engine or other site (A) Referred from any search engine Used a certain search engine query (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Entered at a certain page Visited a certain page Exited from a certain page (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Came from a certain ad campaign Visited on certain dates Had a certain IP address (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Had a certain cookie set (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Had a certain URL parameter (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Had a certain session length From a Certain Country or Region (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Visited on Certain Days of the Week (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Visited at Certain Times of the Day (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only)

67 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics Referrer Label Referred from particular search engine or other site When a visitor is referred from another site the web server records the URL they came from. Common examples include search engines, advertising campaigns, online articles and partner sites. In many cases these are the visitors that are most important to a commercial website, since they usually cost money to attract. The site owner will want to optimize the site design, layout and content to appeal to these groups Step 2: Choose how to match the referring page (the part of the URL up to the?) Contains the string: Most commonly used to label search engine queries where you are not concerned about the individual page referring the visitor. Labeling on google.com would label visitors from and as well as images.google.com since all these pages contain the string 'google.com'. This example would not label visitors from Matches completely: The page up to the? character must match exactly the string entered. This is most often used with partner sites or advertising campaigns where the page part of the URL is predetermined and does not change according to individual visitors. Step 3: Optional: search engine keywords When a visitor is referred from a search engine the original search parameters are also passed inside the referrer string. These parameters are placed after the? character, and take the form of 'parameter name'='value' with an & character between each pair. Try a couple of searches and look at the resulting URLs to get a better feeling for how this works. Restrict label to visitors with the following search parameter: Having defined the referring domain you wish to label, you can now refine the label to highlight only those visitors who searched on a particular criteria. Parameter name: Different search engines use different parameters to indicate the search string. A partial list of the parameter names currently in use is: google yahoo altavista lycos search.aol.com q p q query query You can also label on search parameters independently of the specific search engine. See: Search Engine Query Labels matches exactly: the contents of the specified parameter must match exactly the specified string, ignoring differences in case. contains: partial matching. Note: some sites pass referred visitors through a 'landing page' to assist with database tracking. You can use this instead of referrer labels by labeling the visitors that have visited the landing page. See 'Visited page labels' Step 4: Advanced Labeling Options

68 62 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Referred from any Search Engine Referred from any search engine This simple label will match any visitor that enters the site from a referrer matching the list in searchengines.txt. The typical use is to identify those users who are searching and then enter your site, without regard for whether that search was PPC or traditional search or what the keyword was. Step 2: Advanced Labeling Options Entry Page Label Entered at a certain page The label highlights those visitors that 'enter' the site at the specified page. The entry page is calculated as the first page in the session for a given visitor. Sometimes the entry page is a 'landing' page that uses a database to count visitors referred from certain sites, and then redirects them to the home page. This label makes it easy to highlight these visitors. Step 2: Choose how to match the page Contains the string: Matches those pages that contain the string. Matches completely: Matches against the entire page, including parameters after the? Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Visited Page Label Entered at a certain page The label highlights those visitors that see a specified page. The visitor is labeled if the page appears anywhere in their session. Step 2: Choose how to match the page Contains the string: Matches those pages that contain the string. Matches completely: Matches against the entire page, including parameters after the? Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Ad Campaign Label This feature is only available in some versions of ClickTracks. Came from a certain ad campaign This label highlights those visitors that came from a certain ad campaign. First, you have to have configured your campaigns. Then you will be able to pick out all the visitors who came from one specific

69 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics 63 campaign. Step 2: Choose which campaign you want to track. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Visit Date Label Visited on certain dates Visitors who came to the site between the specified dates are labeled. Step 2: Choose the start and end of the date period. This must fall inside the range of dates selected in the calendar. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Session Length Label Labeling on session length can be used to eliminate those visitors that come to the home page and then disappear, or to highlight those visitors that linger. Step 2: Choose the time period on which to label. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Search Engine Query Label Search Engine Query (Keyword) Labels (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Although the referrer label can be used to highlight search terms being used, it has the disadvantage that it is tied to a particular domain name being labeled. The Search Engine Query Label, on the other hand, works across all search engines. It does this by examining the incoming parameter string and looking for and parameters that match the keywords entered by the visitor. Be aware of this when creating the label criterion. If referrers other than search engines are passing in parameters that could match the string you enter, they will be counted within the stats. Step 2: Choose the keyword either from the list or enter your own string. Select the type of match you wish to perform. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Visited on Certain Days of the Week (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Step 2: Choose the days of the week for which the label will apply. This will allow you to compare behavior on weekdays versus the weekend, for example. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options

70 64 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Visited on Certain Times of the Day (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Step 2: Choose the time of day for the visit start. You can use this to identify visitors coming to the site in the morning and compare to the afternoon, for example. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Exit Page Label Exited at a certain page (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) The label highlights those visitors that exit the site at the specified page. The exit page is calculated as the last page in the session for a given visitor. The pages seen by the visitor and the referrer are reported, even though the exit page will happen later in the session. The original referrer that causes visitors to exit from the certain point can thus be identified. Step 2: Choose how to match the page Contains the string: Matches those pages that contain the string. Matches completely: Matches against the entire page, including parameters after the? Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options IP Address Label (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) The IP address of a visitor can be used as a label criterion. This is most useful when analyzing the data for a corporate intranet or extranet where the IP address of visitors is static and known. For public sites receiving visitors from the open internet, the IP addresses cannot be used to determine country of original or other geographical data, and are rarely reliable or useful. Step 2: Enter an IP, range of IPs or domain name The syntax to define an IP can be any of the following Single IP Wildcard on octet(s) * Range on octet Range & wildcard * Subnet mask /23 If your web server logs DNS entries instead of IPs you must also use DNS entries. Examples: Single IP Wildcard corp.bobsfruitsite.com *.bobsfruitsite.com Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options

71 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics Cookie Label (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) The existence of different cookies for visitors can also be labeled. You must have cookies enabled in your logfile for this to work. This is most often used to distinguish the behavior of repeat visitors, registered visitors etc. Step 2: Choose the cookie name to label. You can label on the existence of the cookie, or on a specific value being present. Specify whether ClickTracks will look for the cookie in just the first page, or all pages. This is important when distinguishing returning visitors. Imagine a new visitor coming to the site. They appear at the front page and the browser presents no cookies to the server, since none have been set. The visitor moves into the site. The next request to the server will contain the server cookies, since it will have been issued after the first request. For measuring returning visitor behavior it is thus essential that the cookie label is applied to just the first request - otherwise all visitors will appear as returning. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options URL Parameter Label (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Some sites have URL parameters that are passed from page to page and indicate specific attributes of a visitor, such as whether they originated from a particular campaign, or if they have been presented with a coupon. The parameter label is a generic way of highlighting these visitors. The parameter values are extracted and labeled before masking of parameters is performed, so a parameter can be labeled even if it is masked out. Step 2: Choose the parameter name to label and optionally a value to check for, using string matching. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options From a Certain Country (ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) Step 2: Choose the country to identify visitors by. The country is determined using a database of IP address to country mapping, and is far more accurate than.com /.fr / co.jp type domain lookup. You may also select a region within the country. Please note that the accuracy of the region reporting varies according to the quality of IP data available. US states are 80-90% accurate whereas the UK is perhaps only 50% accurate due to the way telephone numbers for dial-up ISPs do not have an area code. Step 3: Advanced Labeling Options Advanced Labeling Options Several advanced options are available on the last page of the New Label Wizard: Inverse: The visitors are labeled if the criteria is NOT met. Useful to highlighting those visitors who do not see a certain page, for example. Parent label: The label being created is combined with the parent to create a sub-group (like a logical AND in databases). For example it is possible to label visitors who are referred from a partner site and further sub-group those that have seen a special offer page. The relationship to the parent label may be AND or OR Display options Labels can be turned on and off globally using 'display this label' and can also be enabled within just some specific reports. This can greatly reduce visual clutter and improve performance. Re-analyze immediately: Usually this option should be checked. ClickTracks will analyze the data as soon as

72 66 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer OK is clicked in the dialog. If several labels are to be created at the same time this could lead to several unnecessary passes through the data. This option can be unchecked while all the labels are created and then either checked for the last label, or the Analyze button in the toolbar can be used. Label Name & Color Label Name & Color Each label is assigned a name and color for display in the reports. Color: Select the color that will be used in the reports Name: Select the name that will be used in the reports. This should be as short as possible while still conveying the meaning of the label. Examples of Labeling Examples of Labeling Labeling and comparing different groups of visitors is immensely powerful. Here are some examples using labels: How do referrals from search engines behave? Create labels on 'Referred from another site' and enter the domain name of the search engine, such as google.com. This type of label uses a partial match for the criteria, so 'google' would catch all visitors from google.com, google.co.uk, google.de, groups.google.com etc. This is one of the most common types of label and a shortcut way to create it is by clicking the button in the Site Overview or Path View. How effective is my search engine placement? If you're paying for placement through a service like Google AdWords or Overture your referrals will arrive with specific parameters set in the referral string. In this case you will want to match on the entire referring URL. Use 'Referred from a specific URL' and enter the complete URL with parameters. The matching is done on the entire string so it is important that you enter criteria correctly. Where do visitors enter my site? The question seems simple and is superficially answered in the default Site Overview. A more detailed answer can be found if visitors are labeled using the name of the referring site. The top 5 entry pages are then broken out separately for each and differences in entry point can be seen instantly. My site presents a special offer on a certain page. Is it effective in increasing sales? Navigate to the page presenting the special offer and create a label on 'visitors that see this page'. After analysis navigate to the shopping cart page. Check the 'number of visitors who see this page' where they are labeled with your special offer page. Editing labels

73 It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics Editing labels You can edit existing labels by clicking on 'Edit Labels' dialog within the Tools menu or under the Labels icon in the toolbar. Hiding labels As you create labels you will quickly find that your area of focus shifts from one label to another. Creating 30 or 50 such labels would rapidly become unmanageable. To solve this you can easily hide certain labels and show others. The settings for the labels are retained even when hidden. You can thus build up a set of frequently used labels with the desired criteria and show or hide them depending on the type of data you wish to examine. To hide a label, open the 'Edit Labels' dialog from the Tools menu, and simply uncheck the 'Visible' box next to the label you want to hide. Of course you can show it at any time by rechecking the box. At least one label must be visible. Editing labels You can edit a specific label by selecting the label and clicking on the 'Edit...' button. This takes you back to label creation page, where you can carry out cosmetic changes, such as editing the label color or name, or even change the definition of the label criteria. Deleting labels You may want to delete a label entirely if you are not going to use it again. To do this, just open the 'Edit Labels' dialog, select the label you want to remove, and click on the Delete button. Re-ordering labels

74 68 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer You can change the order of the labels by selecting a label and clicking 'Move Up' or 'Move Down'. Exporting and importing labels You can save an a batch of labels for later use or to share with another user by first selecting any number of existing labels and then clicking on the 'Export...' button. This will save a file of a.lbl type. The file should be named something meaningful and saved in a location where you can find it again easily. Once a the file has been created, it can be re-imported back into the labels by clicking on the 'Import...' button, navigating to the desired.lbl file, and clicking 'Open'. This will add the labels within the.lbl file to the existing set of labels. There is no limit to the number of.lbl files that can be saved, and these files can be shared among users of the system.

75 Options & Configuration

76 70 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 9 Options & Configuration ClickTracks has several configurable options that affect analysis and reporting. The options dialog is accessed by clicking the icon on the ClickTracks main page or on the toolbar. Changing some of the options requires ClickTracks to reanalyze the dataset. Display Options 9.1 Display Options Adjust the number of items displayed in a report: Navigation Report Options Search Report Limits Site Overview Limits Navigation Report Options Hide reports on hyperlinks when they are below In the Browser View the Link Reports are only shown if the percentage value is equal or greater than this threshold. The default value of 1% is a good average value that prevents the Browser View becoming overwhelmed with very infrequently accessed links. Hide paths in Path View when they are below Similar to the Link Display Threshold, this value affects the limit below which pages are not displayed in the Path View. Maximum boxes per column in Path View Sets how many boxes can be displayed in the Path View in the 'previous page' and 'next page' columns Search Report Limits Search Report Limits The Search Report by default shows a maximum of 50 search terms (rows) and 10 engines (columns). You can increase these to display more information. ClickTracks maintains a database of known search engines. If a particular search engine for your site is not listed you probably need to add that to the database. See Search Engine Parameters & Keywords for more information. Site Overview Limits Site Overview Limits Each category in the Site Overview that is a list of pages or words shows the top 10 by default. For each applicable report this can be adjusted. Setting the value to 0 turns off the report.

77 Options & Configuration Analysis Options Analysis options change how ClickTracks performs analysis of the logfiles and datasets. Changes to these values will require re-analysis of the dataset, but it is not necessary to import logfiles again. Default Pages Case Sensitive Server Files Combine Search Engine Statistics Content Targeted Ads Domain Alternate Domain Names Default Pages Default Pages. Equivalent to / Web servers usually have a direct mapping from the URL requested by the visitor to the file that is loaded by the server OS. A URL of ' is represented on the server by a file named 'apple.html' contained within a directory named 'catalog' It's unrealistic to expect a visitor to always remember the complete URL with filename as shown above. A visitor expects to enter and see a home page. The web server somehow needs to map this request to a specific file to be returned. It does this through the concept of a default page. For Apache servers this is usually either index.html or index.htm. For IIS this is default.htm or default.asp. The default page is specified as a list of files that the server attempts to load, trying each file name in turn and finally returning a '404 page not found' error if no match. The list is contained in the web server configuration settings. ClickTracks needs to match pages on the website to file names in the logfile. For the home page of it needs to know the corresponding file name that appears in the log. The standard set of default pages for Apache, IIS and iplanet servers is predefined in ClickTracks and automatically configured during initial logfile analysis. You may need to modify the standard settings if: Your server is configured to look for a different default page ClickTracks is returning different data for the home page ( and the default page, i.e. ClickTracks is failing to match these two names Enter a list of default pages identical to those listed in your server configuration, separated by commas. Alternate Domain Names Case Sensitive Server Files The path name component of a URL is sometimes case sensitive depending on the operating system of the web server. While the domain name component is never case sensitive, the path name can be. For example, if the website is hosted on a Windows server: and are the same page, whereas on a Unix server they would be different pages. A website built on a Windows server can therefore have URLs in both upper and lower case or a combination that refer to the same actual file that is presented to the browser. The web designer may not intentionally create links in mixed case but the fact that a Windows web server permits them without error means they inevitably happen.

78 72 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Conversely on Unix servers the above pages would be different. A mistake made by the web designer is not hidden - the page named with the wrong case would result in a 404 'not found' error. At analysis time ClickTracks needs to gather data for all unique pages. On a Windows server the above requests are for the same page, so ClickTracks needs to know that the web server here is not case sensitive. Usually the case sensitivity of a web server is determined by the server operating system. Windows and MacOS pre OSX are not case sensitive. Unix (including MacOSX) is case sensitive. The one exception to this rule concerns Apache which can be configured with non case sensitive page names even on a Unix system. This situation is rare, however. Combine Search Engine Statistics Combine Search Engine Statistics By default ClickTracks will aggregate the statistics for search engines into a single view, so that referrals from and images.google.com will all appear under the single name 'Google'. This process is performed for all search engines that are defined within the file 'SearchEngines.txt' (see Search Engine Parameters & Keywords for more information) You can elect to show all the search engine domains distinctly by selecting 'No' for this option. Content Targeted Ads Domain Content Targeted Ads Domain For the Content Targeted Ads Report, this option changes whether ClickTracks shows the entire referring page or just the domain of the page that originally carried the ad. Alternate Domain Names Alternate Domain Names The list of Alternate Domain Names is fundamentally important to the way ClickTracks determines the visitor session. In general the correct behavior is for ClickTracks to start a new session (and therefore count a new visitor) whenever the referrer is coming from an external website. Using the example of visitors coming from Google, it's certainly correct that each time someone clicks from Google to the target site a new session should be started, otherwise those clicks will not match the PPC campaign clicks. ClickTracks Professional : domains and alternate domains are configured within the ClickTracks Pro Server. A problem arises where the site is known by several different domain names, for example both and The second domain must be listed as an alternate because otherwise every page clicked in will result in a new session and additional visitor session. The New Dataset Wizard attempts to find cases like this based on examining the IP and DNS entries for the website. A related problem is having pages on an external site, for example newsletter signup. ClickTracks Analyzer cannot track users across these different domains (only Professional can do this) however it is possible to use a goal page that lives back on the main site, and the visitor would see this page after completing the process on the external server. In this case also the external domain should be listed as an alternate. RULE: Alternate domains should include any domain that is inside the website as your visitors perceive it. Visitors coming from any domain not listed will by default be coming from outside and count as an additional new visit. Separate domains in the list with ;

79 Options & Configuration 73 Show me how SEE ALSO: How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session 9.3 Exclusions Sometimes it may be necessary to have ClickTracks ignore certain requests for documents or directories, or requests from certain IPs. Ignore Filenames That Contain Ignore Requests From IPs Ignore Filenames That Contain The web server log contains each file requested by the client machine and served. ClickTracks by default strips out many of these requests including.gif and.jpg files (see Ignore Files for more information on the other file extensions that are excluded). You may find instances where you want ClickTracks to ignore additional file extensions, directories or individual files. The filename exclusion will match any part of a file (without the domain name) and can be used to exclude file types, directories or individual files. Examples: A page contains an embedded movie. The request for the movie will always appear in the logfile immediately following the HTML page containing it. Each visitor seeing the page will appear from the logfile to see the movie as the next page, obscuring the real following page they may have clicked. In this case you will want to exclude the movie. A page is a frameset or contains an iframe. This problem is similar to that above - each visitor will appear to see the sub-frame as the next document. In this case, ClickTracks will automatically add the sub-frames or iframe to the list of files to ignore. See Sites Built With Frames. The site contains a forum or other content repository that contains large numbers of pages each of which are seen by a handful of people. The data on these pages is difficult to interpret and can slow down performance of analyzing the rest of the site. The entire forum directory can be excluded. In most cases partial string matching is most useful. It's easy to match all.swf files for example, or everything in the directory /forum/. Sometimes you might want to exclude a file using exact filename matching, for example to exclude /redherring.html but not /directory/redherring.html. To match the exact file name simply place an = sign at the beginning, e.g., =/redherring.html Ignore Requests From IPs Sometimes you might want to exclude requests from certain addresses from showing up in ClickTracks reports. If, for example, the employees in your organisation frequently set their browser default page as the company home page, the statistics for the corporate site would show an unusually high number of people entering the home page and exiting. Each employee as they open a web browser is inadvertently skewing the statistics. ClickTracks provides a mechanism to ignore requests from certain IPs or domains. Since most companies will use a firewall or proxy server to handle requests for web pages, the requests for the corporate home page will appear to the web server to come from a single or at most a handful if IPs.

80 74 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer The IPs to ignore are entered into the advanced tab of the options dialog. The syntax to define an IP can be any of the following Single IP Wildcard on octet(s) * Range on octet Range & wildcard * Subnet mask /23 If your web server logs DNS entries instead of IPs you must also use DNS entries. Examples: Single IP Wildcard corp.bobsfruitsite.com *.bobsfruitsite.com Advanced Options 9.4 Performance These options allow you to improve the performance of ClickTracks by choosing not to calculate some reports. Most users will not need to use any of these options. They are primarily useful on very large sites, or when running ClickTracks on older computers. See Performance Tuning for other tips to speed analysis Referrer Parameter Details Tracking every possible value for every parameter from each referrer is resource intensive, and often not useful. Checking the 'Don't Show Parameter Values in Referrer Parameter Details' and performance of ClickTracks will be substantially improved Site Overview And Page Analysis Many users of ClickTracks are primarily concerned with Weekly or Monthly data, but not both. Performance can be improved by selecting time period tabs that you're most interested in. Since search terms are another resource intensive calculation, turning off the terms for everything except the 'All dates' tab can help speed processing Search Report Different reports within the Search Engine report can be turned off to improve performance. 9.5 Advanced Options Advanced Options Session Timeout Parameters Parameter Names Case Sensitive Display New Windows / Popups Show "Create Label" Links Discard Other Virtual Servers

81 Options & Configuration Session Timeout Parameters The logfile generated by the server simply contains all the requests for pages in chronological order. Multiple visitors are likely to be simultaneously browsing the site and so the requests from different visitors get mixed together. During analysis ClickTracks reconstructs the sequence of pages requested by the visitors and builds up the complete session, from start to finish. For ClickTracks a session is equivalent to a visitor - the fundamental entity that ClickTracks measures. Three parameters help ClickTracks know when a session is ended. Since the HTTP protocol contains no formal mechanism for defining the end of the visitor session, this must be inferred from the other available data. You can adjust the parameters used to compute this as follows: Max minutes gap page requests. Default = 15 minutes A session is considered over if no requests are received from the visitor within this time. A request received after this time will result in a new session being started - and that session counting as a new visitor. Max duration of session. Default = 30 minutes The session is always closed after this many seconds. Max requests in session. Default = 250 After receiving this number of requests the session is closed and a new session started Parameter Names Case Sensitive Dynamic Page Parameters are usually considered case insensitive, so 'catalogid=123' is the same as 'CatalogID=123'. In rare cases you may need to force case sensitive matching of parameter names. Note that only the parameter name is made case sensitive by this option. Parameter values are always case sensitive Display New Windows / Popups A website that displays popup windows, or causes links to open in new windows, presents a dilemma for ClickTracks, since it only has a single window in which to display a page. Popups will normally open in a separate browser window when ClickTracks navigates to the main page. However, if the popup page contains useful data and you do want to see user behavior data for it, you can instead elect to have the popup displayed in the main ClickTracks window. Alternatively, you can choose to have the popup ignored completely so that it simply never appears. Popups served from external domains are always opened in a separate window, since ClickTracks could not display any data relating to them anyway. You have the same choices for links that open in new windows, except that you can't choose to discard them completely, because they are launched via an explicit click. By default, such links will open inside the main ClickTracks window, but you can choose to open them in a separate browser window if you prefer. Show "Create Label" Links Show "Create Label" Links If you turn this option on, the Site Overview and Search Report will display "Create Label" links beside each item, allowing you to create a new label for that item instantly Discard Other Virtual Servers A single web server may host many web sites using a mechanism known as virtual servers. When configured like this IIS will commonly produce an individual logfile for each site, so it's a simple matter of importing the correct logfile for the site.

82 76 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Apache web servers, on the other hand, may produce a single logfile for all the sites. This file may be later divided up on the server into individual logfiles for each site, so again you simply import the file for the given site. If the file contains many sites mixed together, it's important to divide out the requests for pages within the site being analyzed, and ignore the requests for other sites. ClickTracks looks for the virtual server field in the Apache logfile or cs-host for IIS and if present matches this against the list of domains for the site (specified in Options: Alternate Domain Names). Only domains that match are included and others are discarded. If the virtual server field is missing or not recognized all the lines will be included URL to Distinguish Links Select a parameter that tells ClickTracks which specific link was clicked. See Distinguishing Duplicated Links

83 Sites Built With Frames

84 78 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 10 Sites Built With Frames Analysis of sites built using frames is complicated by the structure of a typical frameset. For example: From the point of view of the user, the page is one page. But from the point of view of the web server, a visitor to this page will appear to move through each of the four files as follows: Frameset->header frame->navigation frame->content frame This page sequence in the logfile clearly presents some challenges, because one page for the user is made up of four separate HTML files. Without special measures, it would look as if the user navigated through a sequence of files. ClickTracks handles this automatically once the page with the frames is encountered while browsing the site. At this point the software needs to ask which frame is the main 'content' frame. It will then ignore the other frames when doing the analysis, and reanalyze the data. This process will be performed only once as long as the same frame structure is used throughout the site. If other framesets are encountered, the process will be repeated. It is important to understand that the frames other than the content frame are added to the list of files that are ignored during analysis. (See Ignore Filenames That Contain). When first reaching a frameset, the left-hand column of the Path View will show the pages from which visitors reached the frameset, and the right-hand column will show the pages the visitors went to from the content frame. For this reason, the total number of visitors on each side of the Path View will not be the same IFrames IFrames handled in a similar though simpler way. ClickTracks only need exclude from the session all the iframe pages, leaving just the outermost containing page. This process is handled transparently.

85 Dynamic Page Parameters

86 80 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 11 Dynamic Page Parameters A URL consists of three elements: domain name, path (file) name and parameters. For example has two parameters being passed into the page: 'item' and 'sessionid'. The parameters are interpreted as part of the page when it is delivered by the server and specify the page contents. The exact relationship of parameter names and values and the page contents are entirely dependent on the implementation of the website. There are no standards or industry norms in common use except that parameters appear after the? in the URL and consist of name / value pairs. In the case of Bobsfruitsite a parameter 'item' of 4 could mean that data about bananas is presented in the page, and a value of 1 could mean apples. The different meanings of the value of this parameter could be very important, if you want to compare how visitors to the apples and bananas pages behave. The sessionid parameter in the example above could be simply a unique value that the server needs to identify each individual visitor to the site. The different values are not significant in understanding visitor behavior. ClickTracks needs to match URLs in the Browser View to URLs in the logfiles so that the correct data is attached to the page. For the matching to work on dynamic pages (those containing a? character followed by name / value pairs) ClickTracks needs to know which parameters are important and which should be ignored by the matching software. The importance of this is best illustrated by example. ClickTracks needs to know which parameters are significant and which should be ignored when examining pages and mapping links traversed. This is done through the parameter masking dialog. Each parameter name can be checked, causing ClickTracks to ignore (mask) that parameter. The importance of this process cannot be overstated. Failing to mask a parameter such as sessionid would result in ClickTracks thinking that all visitors follow a unique path through the site. On the other hand if too many parameters are masked out ClickTracks would be unable to distinguish between pages that are in fact different, and would display all visitors as travelling to all links. Usually ClickTracks makes the right choice by itself, but sometimes you may need to help it. If you select 'Dynamic Page Parameters' from the Tools menu, you can specify exactly which parameters should be masked during the analysis.

87 Dynamic Page Parameters 81 Parameters with a cross are the ones which will be masked, i.e. ignored. Hits: Indicates the number of times a parameter is seen in requests Values: Indicates the range of values seen for the given parameter. A session ID would have a very wide range of values, since it's effectively unique for all visitors. This is very useful in quickly determining if a parameter should be masked or not. Auto-Calc: Repeats the calculation that is performed when the initial logfile is imported, and guesses which parameters need to be masked and which do not. Show me how 11.1 How Parameter Masking Works Masking a parameter removes it from all URLs that occur in the logfile. The URL when sessionid were masked would become The masked parameter in other words is simply removed from the URLs as ClickTracks processes them. Similarly when ClickTracks navigates to a page inside the website it can simply remove that parameter from the URL in the address bar and correspond that to the pages seen from the logfile.

88 ClickTracks Analyzer Compared to Professional

89 ClickTracks Analyzer Compared to Professional ClickTracks Analyzer Compared to Professional ClickTracks Professional contains a number of enhancements over Analyzer such as additional reports. In addition Pro works in a significantly different way with regard to logfile processing and cookie handling. More Reports Pro contains more reports than Analyzer. Specifically : Revenue tracking for ROI What's Changed Report Countries and Regions Funnel Report A/B Splits Time Splits Convenience Features Ability to list multiple pages in a single PDF or Excel export Multiple user access with each user able to create and manipulate their own reporting Browser-based reports Hassle free logfile processing Most processing takes place on a server, with the powerful iterative analysis taking place on the client. Logs are downloaded and processed on a nightly or hourly schedule. The ClickTracks Server connects automatically and intelligently decides which logs are new and must be downloaded and processed, greatly reducing the hassle of log processing. Built for large sites The server side processing of ClickTracks Pro includes support for sites that span multiple domains and sites deployed on load balanced servers. See Sites That Span Multiple Domains Under-the-hood enhancements Persistent cookie database to track unique visitors and campaign conversion metrics across long periods of time. See Cookie Handling The configuration above is a typical example. The ClickTracks server connects to the web server periodically and pulls in the new logfile data over FTP. After processing the compressed data is posted to a designated directory. The client machines connect to the server using either Windows file share or FTP and pull in this new data, performing the final analysis steps. Important: the client application that the end-users will run must be able to access the files prepared by the server application. The ClickTracks server must be configured to place these files into network accessible directory.

90 84 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer In some instances it may be advantageous to run both the server and the client in the same machine. Since communication from ClickTracks Server to the Client takes place through file shares this configuration is supported easily: 12.1 Cookie Handling ClickTracks Professional Server can be configured to use a specific session cookie to improve the accuracy of following visitors through the site, especially if your site has many visitors from AOL. Professional Server also uses a powerful database to store data about visitors and to lookup that data when a visitor comes back to the site. The database stores the persistent ID, the landing page, referrer, time of last visit, time of first visit. Using this data ClickTracks can calculate simple data like the number of unique visitors, and can map conversion events back to the original campaign and search engine/keyword. The following applies to ClickTracks Pro when using logfiles. ClickTracks Pro Hosted (using JavaScript) automatically sets suitable cookies and requires no configuration. Configuring session cookies A session cookie is one that goes away when the user closes the browser window. It's the opposite of a persistent cookie. Many dynamic site generation tools like PHP and ASP contain easy session cookie management. ClickTracks (both Analyzer and Pro) contains support for these standard session cookies. ClickTracks Pro can be configured to use any custom session cookie. If your site uses a custom cookie you simply define this inside the ClickTracks Pro Server. Persistent cookie tracking for better campaign accuracy. See Using Persistent Cookies To Improve Campaign Tracking 12.2 Sites That Span Multiple Domains Larger sites are often built with multiple subdomains like: secure.bobsfruitsite.com ClickTracks Professional uses a more sophisticated session tracking algorithm that accounts for visitors moving around across the multiple domains. Pro maintains a relationship between the page /index.html and the domain that it occurs within (Analyzer cannot distinguish between /index.html across two domains and treats them as the same page). Pro also maintains several techniques for tracking the user when their session cookie disappears as they move from domain to domain.

91 Daily use of ClickTracks

92 86 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 13 Daily use of ClickTracks When you use ClickTracks to regularly view visitor behavior data you will always make sure you: 1. Import the latest logfiles from the web server 2. Adjust the date range to include the new data. Adding logfiles, Selecting date range 13.1 Adding log files As you use ClickTracks regularly to evaluate and understand how visitors interact with your site you will need to import the latest logfiles from your web server. Most web servers rotate the logfile at 4:00 am on the first day of the week or month. It's very inconvenient to have to wait until this time to import the latest data, so you will probably want to import the latest data from the active logfile. When importing a logfile ClickTracks examines it to determine if it has already loaded some of the data from it on a previous occasion. This will be true frequently if you are importing an active logfile to which the server is adding new data. Each time this file is imported ClickTracks will examine it and load only the new data. You can always just import logfiles into a data set, and rely on ClickTracks to work out which data is new Selecting date range Because ClickTracks focuses on present visitor behavior rather than historical trends, you will normally only be interested in the most recent one or perhaps two months' worth of data. Sometimes you might want to look at an even narrower date range. You might want to see what visitors did on a certain day, for example. Or if you've just had a site redesign, you will want to concentrate on the visitor behavior after the time of the redesign so that ClickTracks' live view of the site will accurately reflect what visitors saw. You can select a date range you're interested in by clicking the calendar icon choosing the start and/or end date from the dialog. on the toolbar and

93 Daily use of ClickTracks 87 The first three options specify a moving time span. As you import new data the start and end date will move in synchronisation with the new data. This simplifies the process of dealing with new data. 'Analyze whole dataset' produces reports for all available data. Naturally this can take longer than for a shorter time span. 'Exact dates' allows you to specify an exact start and end date. Note the date is inclusive, so setting the start and end the same produces a single day of data. Note also that due to server log file generation times, and the time zone of your server relative to ClickTracks, a single day at the beginning of your imported data may be less than 24 hours worth of data.

94 Advanced Topics

95 Advanced Topics Advanced Topics Strip Out File Types Robots & Spiders Search Engine Parameters & Keywords 14.1 Websites Containing Multiple Domains ClickTracks Analyzer can analyze only a single domain within a dataset. If you need to perform analysis of sites that span several domains you need to use ClickTracks Professional in almost all cases. The only situation where Analyzer can deal with multiple domains is where visitors leave the site to perform an action such as newsletter signup, and then return to the main site to a confirmation page. A goal page can be defined as the confirmation page as long as the external site is listed in alternate domains. Show me how If the external site is not listed as an alternate domain then visitors coming back to the confirmation page are assumed to be coming from a site that really is external, resulting in a new visitor session being counted and the referring URL becoming part of the top referrers report. A complete description of the enhancements in ClickTracks Professional can be found here 14.2 How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session A fundamental concept in ClickTracks is the way a visitor session is determined. This process greatly influences almost every statistic that ClickTracks calculates. The following applies almost entirely to ClickTracks when used with logfiles. ClickTracks Hosted bypasses many of the complications described. Definition of a session The raw logfile contains requests from IP addresses for different pages, each on a different line and in chronological order. A fundamental problem to be solved in logfile analysis therefore is which pages are seen by which visitors. This is further complicated by the fact that requests from different visitors are mixed together in the log. A method must be used to extract the pages for visitor A and correctly associate them in order, and to simultaneously perform this for all other visitors. This process is know as sessionizing the data. A session is the sequence of pages seen by a single visitor during their visit to the site. What is a visitor? A visitor cannot be determined solely from their IP address. The IP address can change during the course of the visit length (A problem with AOL and some visitors originating at large companies). A single IP also may represent many different visitors at different times or at the same time, for example a large company will have all browser requests coming via a single firewalled IP. ClickTracks therefore uses several techniques to join pages as they are read from the logfile to the correct visitor session: 1. A session cookie present in the logfile guarantees accurate sessionization for the second and later requests (there's no cookie in the first request, so the sessionization falls back to the no cookie case and uses the heuristics described below). ClickTracks Analyzer uses PHP, ASP or JSP session cookies automatically. ClickTracks Pro can be configured for any custom cookie. 2. Without a session cookie ClickTracks uses a combination of partial IP address (to account for changing IPs for AOL etc.), user agent, time since last request and referrer to select the most likely session the request belongs to. These factors are fed into a heuristically based algorithm that factors in how busy the site is. The accuracy of the heuristics ranges from 100% for medium sites to 95% for very busy sites without cookies and large numbers of users from AOL.

96 90 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer Sessionization from start to finish Logfile reading Graphics files are stripped. Since ClickTracks doesn't calculate technical stats like server bandwidth there's no need to count them. HEAD requests ignored. If it's a valid page request it will be followed up with a GET later Status code checked: & 304 are successes , except 304, are redirects and counted. All other codes are failures and the request is dropped. Check the user agent. If it's a known robot/spider like Googlebot the request is dropped (a separate report uses this data however) Check if this logfile line has been read before (ie it exists within the dataset). Duplicates are dropped. This process prevents accidental re-importing of the same logfile from resulting in double counting, and permits overlapping logfiles to be imported and only the overlapping range is dropped. Building sessionized visits Strip requests that are excluded via the options dialog. Is the referrer 'external' (ie not a domain that's part of the alternate domain names)? If so a new visit session is started. This ensures PPC tracking is accurate, since a visitor coming through in rapid succession on several PPC ads (clicking back to the search engine between them) is the same visitor refining their search, yet each click must be counted distinctly. Session cookie present? If so find the corresponding visitor data and add this page to the session. If no session cookie fall back to heuristics based on partial IP, user agent, time, etc. Find the most likely visit session to attach the page to. If no existing session is found a new session is started using this page as the opening page. Has the session reached the maximum duration, number of pages etc as determined by the options setting? If so the session is deemed to be complete. ClickTracks Pro persistent cookie tracking The cookie database in ClickTracks Pro is examined also to determine if this visitor session represents a visitor previously seen. If so the number of unique visitors will account for this, and the original campaign referrer and landing page are recovered from the database and placed into the dataset. Visitor conversions that take place long after campaign completion are correctly tracked. Adding sessions to the dataset Once a session is complete according to the timeout parameters, additional sanity checks are performed before the session is committed to the dataset. Some robots do not provide a valid user agent so ClickTracks examines the session to see if a repeating pattern of pages is being requested. If this is found the session is dropped and not counted. Valid sessions are updated with the session length (up to the last page) and exit pages etc. and then committed to the dataset How ClickTracks Uses Cookies To use cookies within ClickTracks you must both set the cookie within your website code and record the cookie within the logfile. (ClickTracks Hosted does these for you automatically) ClickTracks Analyzer Session cookies for PHP, ASP and JSP are used to improve accuracy of tracking visitor sessions. See How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session If the site sets a persistent cookie then simple new versus returning comparisons of visitors can be made. Analysis of visitors with specific cookie values is also possible.

97 Advanced Topics 91 ClickTracks Pro Custom session cookies are supported. Persistent cookie database tracks unique visitors and extends campaign and conversion tracking to work across long periods of time (latent conversions). See ClickTracks Analyzer Compared to Professional Using Persistent Cookies To Improve Campaign Tracking ClickTracks Pro Hosted manages its own set of persistent cookies - all the topics below work automatically for Pro Hosted. Campaign tracking relies on tying a conversion event back to a campaign or search engine keyword that generated the lead. The complication for web analytics tools is that the clickthrough and conversion often occur hours, days or even weeks apart. Since the users IP address and other data is almost sure to change across such a long period of time, a unique and persistent cookie is simply the only reliable method for tracking. It cannot be overstated that good campaign data depends on setting a unique, persistent cookie. Configuring persistent cookies Cookies are a part of the HTTP protocol and are exchanged between browser and server during the time the browser requests pages. They are then logged in the logfile. It's important to understand therefore that ClickTracks cannot itself set any cookies - only the website itself can do this. it's in the interest of the website owner to set and manage the cookies because this provides the best possible long term solution. Even though writing website code to handle the cookies seems complex and time consuming you should do it. It's too important to ignore. The persistent cookie you use can have any name, and the contents are unimportant as long as they are unique and won't be changed later. To meet these requirements you must : 1. Create a unique value for the cookie. The system time (epoch time) with a random number appended is good enough 2. Set the cookie with an expiry many weeks / months in the future. 3. Never reset the value of the cookie (in other words, if it exists don't replace it) Setting the cookie probably requires some small custom development within the website. You'll then configure the ClickTracks Pro Server to use this cookie name, and that's it. ClickTracks will take care of all the rest automatically. Apache mod_usertrack For users of Apache there is a very convenient way to handle both session and persistent cookies without needing to change any code in the website. Install mod_usertrack, configure cookies to be logged within the logfile and tell ClickTracks Pro Server to 'Use Only Unnamed Cookies' (cookies set by mod_usertracks are strange in that they have no name, only a value) Configuring Web Servers ClickTracks requires that certain fields be present in the logfile. If possible check the sever configuration to confirm the fields are present. If your website is hosted by your ISP you may have little choice over the logfile fields present. You can contact the ISP and they should be able to confirm the settings or make any changes needed. ClickTracks requires these fields: Date and Time Client IP Address HTTP Method Requested file and Query string

98 92 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer User Agent Referrer Status code Cookie (preferable, but not required) Virtual server name (required only for multi-domain logs) The referrer and user agent fields are essential for ClickTracks to generate reliable reports. Internet Information Server (IIS), Apache Internet Information Server (IIS) The default installation of IIS writes minimal information to the logfile. Most Websites have changed the IIS configuration to write more detailed information. ClickTracks requires: W3C Extended Logfile Format Date Time Client IP Address Method URI Stem URI Query User Agent sc-status Cookie (preferable, but not required) Referrer cs-host (only required for multi-domain logfiles) Other fields may be logged and will be safely ignored by ClickTracks. Open Control Panels from the system Start menu. Open Administrative Tools. Open 'Computer Management'. Expand 'Services and Applications'. Now expand 'Internet Information Services' Right click on 'Default Web Site'. Logfile settings are contained in the 'Web Site' tab, at the bottom. Click 'Properties' then 'Extended Properties' to verify the settings above Apache Apache is configured through a text file that contains many other settings that are beyond the scope of this document. The settings relating to logfiles are: LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined CustomLog /var/log/httpd/access combined The first line defines a log format named 'combined' containing the fields in the order specified. The second line ties the named format to the actual file name to be used when writing the information. Other fields may be present in the logfile, and the order of fields is not critical. Most Apache installations are similar to the above and require no further modification. Logging cookies If your site is setting cookies either through the built-in session cookie of a scripting language like PHP, or your own custom cookie, you'll get better results through ClickTracks if the cookies are present in the log. Modify your log format line like this : LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"

99 Advanced Topics 93 \"%{cookie}i\"" combined For more information see How ClickTracks Uses Cookies 14.5 Strip Out File Types A typical web page is made up of many individual files. Beyond the HTML page itself, each graphic element is a separate.gif,.png or.jpg file. As the browser requests these elements the web server will record them into the logfile. Most of these requests can be ignored by ClickTracks because the containing HTML page request is all that is required to determine visitor behavior patterns. Stripping the requests bring two benefits: 1. Increased performance since much data from the original logfile is not analyzed 2. Better visitor behavior data because reports show the actions initiated by visitors and are not clouded by requests made by the browser for components within the page. Files are ignored based on file name extension, ie.gif. This process takes place within ClickTracks as part of two separate phases: Log File Importing When you import the logfiles they are stored in an internal format known as the normalized format. During importing each request from the log is compared to a list of extensions contained in a file named 'FileExtensionsToIgnore.txt'. Although you can edit this file (it's inside the 'data' folder in the same location as the ClickTracks.exe program) you should be aware that any file extensions ignored during importing are permanently removed from the dataset. Although you could re-import the logfiles this is usually a tedious process and should be avoided. It is therefore wise to list files inside 'FileExtensionsToIgnore.txt' only when you are certain they will never be required for analysis or used for labeling visitors. The file extensions listed in FileExtensionsToIgnore.txt by default are:.jpg.jpeg.gif.png.ico.css.js.jar.exe.mid.ida.class.bmp.vbs See also: Ignore Filenames That Contain 14.6 Robots & Spiders Many of the requests to your web server are from 'robots' or 'spiders'. These are programs that browse the web automatically, for example to compile indexes for search engines. Although these requests are important for your site's visibility on search engines, they're not relevant for visitor behavior reports, and so ClickTracks automatically removes sessions that appear to be generated from robots and spiders from these reports and isolates them into a single special robot report. It does this in two ways: If the session begins by requesting 'robots.txt' this all subsequent pages from this session removed from the behavior reports. If the user agent contains any string from the file 'UserAgentsToIgnore' (using partial matching) the session is

100 94 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer removed from the behavior reports. Finally a visitor session that repeatedly requests the same pattern of pages is removed from the behavior reports. The robot report (available in ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro only) details robot reports from certain specific search engines. See Robot Report for details Search Engine Parameters & Keywords Several components of ClickTracks require a definition of search engines and the names of the parameters passed in with the referring URL. When ClickTracks shows a list of top search terms it has extracted this by examining each URL and determining if it comes from a 'known' search engine, and if so the name of the parameter that contains the original search terms / keywords. The search engines are defined in the file 'SearchEngines.txt'. You can edit this file to add your own specific search engines if you wish. The syntax is a tab separated list of parameters: Domain name, partial match OK Display name shown in reports Search parameter. If more than one separated by commas. This is the parameter picked up in the referrer that contains the keywords, ie q for Google Home page of engine Search page of engine. ClickTracks will visit this URL with the search parameter set to a string if the user clicks this option in the UI Distinguishing Duplicated Links A page that links to another often does so from several different hyperlinks. The most common example is a home page with a navigation bar at the top and another with text only links at the bottom. Since both hyperlinks point to the same URL, the request is identical regardless of whether the user clicks the top link or the bottom. Marketers sometimes need to know which link is really being used more, since this can heavily influence site design decisions. ClickTracks is able to distinguish these links if a parameter is added to them within the HTML. Each time the link is used on a given page, a parameter with a different value should be added so the links can be distinguished when ClickTracks reads the logfile. Since this requires a modification to the site you should plan carefully and thoroughly understand what needs to be done. Decide on a single parameter that will be used to distinguish and that has an easy to recognize name like 'from' or similar. Decide on a consistent set of values. For example 'from=topnav' and 'from=bottomnav' or 'linkid=1' and 'linkid=2'. The value needs to be unique within a page for a given link, but does not have to be unique for every single link and page. For example the two links 'news.php?from=topnav' and 'product.php?from=topnav' have the same distinguishing parameter, but this is OK because they're referencing different pages. The parameter must appear as the last one on each link. news.php?catalogid=5&from=topnav for example. Once the site is modified to include the parameter on each page, you'll need to set the date range in ClickTracks to include only the dates after this. Be aware of possible side effects in search engine optimization. Adding this parameter to each link could affect the ability of search engine spiders to crawl and index your site. This depends on the particular search engine, and the technology it currently employs. Consult a specialist search engine consultant and have them evaluate this for you. Once the parameter is setup on your site you simply need to configure ClickTracks to use it. Options->advanced

101 Advanced Topics 95 and choose the parameter name from the drop down menu Tracking External Links When a user clicks to a page that is outside your site the request shows up in the logfile of target page, and not within your site. If your site makes extensive use of such hyperlinks for partner sites or affiliate programs, you may be missing significant data from the website. This problem can be solved by modifying the links pointing to external sites to instead point to an internal page that then redirects to the external site. The internal page will appear in the logfile and be counted, and the user will see no difference in the site use. Here's how this is done. This examples uses the PHP website scripting language. ASP and other scripting will work in a very similar manner : First, modify the external links. If your site is ' and the external site is ' then the HREFs will be <A href=' Modify these links to : <A href='exit.php?url= Do this for each external link. The second step is to write the PHP page for exit.php. It's about as simple as PHP gets : <?php $url header("location: exit;?> This single line outputs the HTTP header telling the browser to redirect to the target URL. Make sure this is at the top of the exit.php file. Finally, make sure ClickTracks does not mask the URL parameter. Open 'Dynamic Page Parameters' and uncheck the box for the 'url' parameter if necessary Why The Numbers Don't Match Other Stats Programs The user of ClickTracks has very often also used other web stats programs. Even a superficial glance through the reports can reveal differences in the numbers between ClickTracks and other stats software, occasionally big differences. Use the information below as a guide to how ClickTracks works and depending what you see use the tips to adjust settings in ClickTracks or your other stats software: Number of visitors is too high in ClickTracks ClickTracks counts the figure 'visitor' as a single session, not as a unique visitor (unique visitor count is available in ClickTracks Pro when persistent cookie are configured). The unique visitor figure is usually 10-30% lower than the visitor figure commonly used in ClickTracks. Sometimes robots pinging the site are not successfully filtered by ClickTracks (see How ClickTracks Determines a Visitor Session). If your site is using a monitoring service or crawler that uses GET requests instead of HEAD, add the IP address for it to Options->Exclusions. Number of visitors is drastically too high The aliases/alternate names for the site were not set correctly during the new dataset wizard. A referrer in the logfile is being detected as 'external' when in fact it's within the site, resulting in a new visitor session on every page. Make the dataset again being careful to include all aliases of the domain. Number of visitors is drastically too low ClickTracks doesn't recognise graphics as being part of the session. If another site is loading graphics directly

102 96 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer from your server then other programs might erroneously count that as a new session, while ClickTracks won't. You'll need to find from your raw logs which website is 'leeching' your graphics. Number of visitors is different Consider changing the session parameters in Options->advanced. There is no 'right' value, though the defaults are typical for most sites. See Session Timeout Parameters ClickTracks does a very good job eliminating robots from the data. It's possible the other stats software doesn't do such a thorough job and therefore its number of visitors is inflated. Visitors referred from 'external' sites count as new visitors in ClickTracks which most other logfile analysis programs don't do. Forcing external referrers to be new visitors results in much more accurate click numbers for PPC search engines where the same visitor can click through several different ads to the same site as they refine their search. Each of these clicks must be counted. Not excluding your own IP address If you're excluding your IP address in your other stats programs, do the same in ClickTracks. Compare like with like ClickTracks doesn't report hits or graphic file downloads. The number of visitors in ClickTracks should not be compared to either. Top seen pages In the site overview report ClickTracks shows the top pages report. This counts the number of visitors that see the page at least once. Multiple view (hits) on the page are not counted if it's the same visitor in the same session (since they only really see the page the first time through). ClickTracks will be accordingly lower than another program that counts hits on the page. PDF downloads PDF files are handled in a special way by web browsers. The first part of the file is loaded and displayed immediately. The browser then downloads chunks of the file in the background and displays them as they're complete. This results in multiple requests for the same file with a special status code. ClickTracks collapses all these requests into a single download of the PDF. Most other stats programs don't, and their PDF figures are inflated. Different algorithms In the final analysis, it should be made clear that ClickTracks uses its own algorithms to determine things like visitor sessions. Some differences with other stats programs are inevitable.

103 Troubleshooting

104 98 ClickTracks Analyzer/Optimizer 15 Troubleshooting Sometimes ClickTracks does not display any data when you navigate to a page. There are two different types of problems: 1. The Page Analysis View and Path View indicate 'no data available for this page' and there are no % bars in the browser area. See Page Not Found 2. The Page Analysis View and Path View contain data, but no links appear in the browser. See No Links Inside Page 15.1 Page Not Found Reasons why 'No data available for page' is displayed: 1. Default page is not set correctly for your site. If you just navigated to your home page ( and you see no data, the most likely cause is default page handling. See Default Pages for more information. 2. The domain is not within the one being analysed. If you click a link that takes you out of the data contained in your server & logfile, ClickTracks cannot display any data. 3. The page has recently been added to the site, and does not appear in the logfiles yet. 4. On very complex URLs with multiple parameters you should confirm the Dynamic Page Parameters settings. 5. The page matches one of the exclusions. See Ignore Filenames That Contain 15.2 No Links Inside Page If bars do not appear next to the hyperlinks, but the Path View indicates people are visiting the pages, check the following: 1. Is the hyperlink a javascript: reference? Press [Function] F2 and click the link. A bar should appear. 2. Is the hyperlink created using DHTML? F3 to get ClickTracks to regenerate the reports after the hyperlink is drawn, or F2 as above. See Pop-up menus and DHTML for more information If the hyperlink is complex with many dynamic parameters, try checking the Dynamic Page Parameters settings. Finally, if the hyperlink points back to your home page, the likely problem is Default Pages Logfile Import Warning When importing a logfile ClickTracks performs a basic check to make sure the log is for the specified domains within the dataset. Most logfiles do not specify the domain to which they belong, so ClickTracks examines the referrer field. Most referrer entries will be the domain being analyzed, with a few from Google and other external sources of traffic. If the majority of referrers are not within the domain or domain aliases, an error is generated. The error most commonly indicates the logfile is really from a different domain and should not be imported. Make sure the FTP login and directory are setup for the correct server and domain If you're sure the logfile is part of the website being analyzed, and should be included in the dataset, you may

105 Troubleshooting 99 need to add the domain for this logfile to the list of domain aliases inside the options dialog. If the logfile is part of a shopping cart system from another server you probably need to use ClickTracks Professional. Professional has more advanced session tracking and can follow a user across different logfiles Performance Tuning See Performance in Options Dialog.

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