Hello all
I’m back from my unusually long summer break, hope to be able to write new articles soon!! 
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Back from Long Summer Break
Thursday, August 27th, 200924th of June 09: Web Analytics Wednesday
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009For our swiss Web Analysts, Marketers and anyone interested in this subject, the WAA’s (Web Analytics Association’s) Web Analytics Wednesday will be held on 24th of June 09 in Lausanne Switzerland.
Signup here: Web Analytics Wednesday Lausanne, 24th of June 09
Would be glad to meet you there!
Rating System on Web Analytics Cookbook
Monday, May 18th, 2009Dear all
I just added a rating system to my blog, in order to obtain a vague idea if you like or not my posts… I would appreciate any feedback!
Thanks
Maximum URL Length Web Analytics
Monday, April 27th, 2009I received an organic search visit with the search phrase “maximum length of a URL web analytics”. So the answer: To my knowledge, there is no limitation in URL lengths due to analytics softwares. However, maximum URL length depends on browsers.
Currently, IE 7 is limited to 2048 characters in terms of URL that can be used for a request. In other terms, any web analytics software relying on client side tagging is limited by this same maximal URL length, and the server call to collect data must not be longer than 2048 characters. The server call inlcudes the URL of the tagged page PLUS any other information that is collected by the tag, e.g. referrer, client configuration, visitor id… So the limit of the tagged page’s original URL is much lower than the actual maximum URL length allowed.
Most other web browsers have some limits as well, but those are quite high and shouldn’t impact ability to collect data (more information here: http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html).
In the field of mobile browsing, URL limitation can be much lower. Many handsets still don’t support URLs longer than 128, 256 or 512 characters, in particular WAP devices (as opposed to devices carrying a full blown HTTP browser).
Parent/Child Profiles - Basics
Friday, April 3rd, 2009Finally, the first post out of this series. I decided to start off with some basics. Basics about what Parent/Child profiles are, can do, and can’t do. In other words, I want to give you some idea to help you decide whether Parent/Child profiles can be useful to accomplish what you want to do.
- A Parent/Child profile, whether full-featured or basic, is a way to define a set of profiles (children) with the same configuration split up by some kind of rule starting from a given set of data.
- The parent won’t contain any data, nor aggregate of the children. It is a mere template, defining the configuration for each child.
- All children have strictly the same configuration, except access rights and the split rule.
- Access rights are set either globally at the parent’s level (each child will inherit the same access rights) or set individually on each child.
- If access rights are set on a child, the access rights of the parent will be ignored!
- Any filter set on the Parent/Child profile will be applied to each children after the data has been split.
- Children are analyzed sequentially on one CPU. One Parent won’t split analysis over multiple CPUs.
- By default, the split rule is based on the value of the parameter WT.sp, which can contain multiple values separated by space (default). The parameter and the separator can be changed.
- By default, the split values are compared as substrings, not exact match. Keep this in mind if you count on having 1000 children, you will have to reconfigure each one manually!
- Split can be defined with regular expressions.
If you have read this list and think that Parent/Child profiles are still for you, stay tuned for the following posts on more crusty details, like maximum length of split values, how to safely create, delete and deactivate children, case studies on performance issues, etc.
As always, feel free to comment or ask for specific information you would need.
Announcement: Parent/Child Profiles Posts
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009Working with parent/child profiles in WebTrends made me understand that there are quite some considerations and pitfalls to take into account before using them.
My next series of posts will be about different aspects of this functionality.
Hope to find the time soon…
PS: Feel free to leave me a comment here if you are interested on this topic or if you have any specific question…
Welcome
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Welcome to my blog about web analytics and all related topics!
I will try to publish articles regularly, exposing case studies, experiences, concepts and thoughts I will have during my activity as Web Analytics Consultant.
Hope to catch your attention and count you among my readers!