Ok yes I am being a baby because I’m not used to the weather, but its really hot for once in Seattle, so I feel uber lethargic. I think I’m typing at about 40 wpm, that’s how lethargic I am. Pyramid beer probably did not help. Below is a picture of the weird clouds hanging out now that we have crazy hot weather, courtesy of Cydne.

Today at work finally gained some momentum on a project, got to do some event tracking, and figured out how to get rid of those pesky parameters appended to the end of URLs in Google Analytics like: “sarahdeatley.com/index.php?id=13c4eb92kp“.  Sometimes they are useful for tracking different content within a site or for campaigns, but other times its the same content, and yet you’re seeing 20 different URLs that all are the same page.

I thought that you’d need to create complicated filters to accomplish this, but turns out its a really simple fix in the profile settings. Its easy:

1. Click “Edit” when viewing profile settings.
2. Click “Edit” in the first box that says “Main Website Profile Information”
3. Enter the offending URL Query Parameter in the form. So in the example above you would enter in “id.”

Yay for simple solutions, but if you have more complex needs, see this post by Justin Cutroni. Or if you need web analytics inspiration in general, read Avinash Kaushik’s latest post.

In other news I discussed my page tagging ideas with someone at work, and found out that the excessively complex page tagging is mainly in Omniture, and not so much WebTrends.  Basically we decided that controlling too much of the tagging limits creativity, but lack of documentation/control can lead to a chaotic mess.  We also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of automation in extracting data from reporting tools.  We both find the idea scary, but I know there are others who think its key to having more time to focus on analysis. I’m too hot to figure out an answer. Someone else should do it for me please.

I’ve played around with WebTrends some already, but now I can compare it more to Omniture and Google Analytics. Main things that struck me:

1. Things take forever to load (especially when you first open a profile because of the volume of data) and there’s no indication of that the page is still loading. This is a UI feedback issue, but still, kind of annoying.
2. The dashboard (I think the same goes for Omniture too) is not easily manipulable like in Google Analytics.
3. I like their way of changing the period of time viewed, that its a calendar and a drop down menu of common time periods.
4. Its nice to be able to have templates so you can easily access certain reports that are targeted for deeper analysis within a profile.
5. Graphs are not very visually appealing, so I can see why you’d need to create graphs and charts in Excel most of the time.
6. You can create a calculated measure for a metric, such as bounce rate (I still wish it were automatic like in GA though). **OK I lied, I think you still need to calculate bounce rate in Excel because of the available fields for report queries and calculated measures.
7. What is an active visit, WebTrends? I discussed this with someone for 10 minutes and we could not figure out the difference between an active visit and a normal visit. They claim its something to do with sessions, but the numbers were almost exactly the same, so who knows.
8. I did like that they define terms on each report page, which is nice for a novice, but you can turn it off as well.

Ultimately this seemed about the same as Omniture, though I know there are more differences, my only preference would be for Omniture based on the UI alone. I’m sure I will develop a more detailed impression over time.

Also, Seattle? Thunderstorms, really?

UPDATE: talked to someone about active visits in WebTrends, and found out that its a metric meant to measure the users who are on the site overnight as one visitor. So if someone is looking at the site from 11:59 PM until 12:03 AM the following day, they will not be counted as 2 visitors. He also said that he doesn’t really use this metric (I didn’t think that “active visits” would comprise a large segment of users), and this made me feel vindicated.