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WebTrends Reporting Q & A
Q: What is WebTrends?
A: WebTrends is a program that can analyze the
log files from your web site and provide simple to detailed
reports on the traffic of your web site.
Q: What type of WebTrends reporting does Acme offer?
A: The level of WebTrends reporting we offer
depends upon the web hosting plan you have selected. Our
basic WebTrends reporting provides weekly and monthly overview
reports. These reports are typically run at midnight on
Sunday of each week, or at the end of a given month Our
Deluxe WebTrends reports, available with certain hosting plans,
offers an in-depth analysis of your web site log
files. The Deluxe WebTrends reporting has
"everything" turned on in the report, and offers
graphical bar charts and pie graphs.
Q: What if I would like more frequent reporting?
A: Acme provides access to your log files. You
may download your log files as often as you choose. There
are many freeware and commercial log file analysis tools that
you can customize and run on your log files - as frequently as
you desire.
Q: How do I view my web site log files and/or WebTrends
reports?
A: For your privacy, we don't post
viewing instructions on our web site. Please contact our
Online Help Desk to
request access to your reports. Don't forget to include
your name, company name if applicable and domain name or web
address in your request. This will allow us to identify
your account and provide detailed instructions for
accessing your web site statistics.
Q: Why do my Webtrends reports show too few hits
for a week or month?
A: This can be caused by a corrupt entry in your
log file. A corrupt entry in your log file is usually the result
of an Internet search engine attempting to index pages on your
site to include in their database. While indexing your site they
may send a malformed request to the server that gets recorded in
the log file. WebTrends is unable to read these malformed log
entries and thus does not generate an accurate report.
We have been seeing more and more of this
lately. Unfortunately other than blocking search engines from
indexing your site there isn't much we can do until they
correct their retrieval methods. If we did block them (which is
possible) it would defeat the purpose of making your site
findable on search engines.
Q: Is it possible to save web trends
reports for archive purposes?
A: This is fairly easy to do with Microsoft
FrontPage or any other web editor since the WebTrends reports
are standard .html pages with graphic images files (.jpg or
.gif).
You can login to your site via Microsoft FrontPage or any FTP
client software, go to the _reports directory and download a
copy of all the files in that directory each week or month to
your own computer.
On your local computer you can create a directory called
something like /reportarchive and move a copy of your report
files to that directory.
Next, you will want to rename the weekly.htm and monthly.htm
files to something like weekone.htm, weektwo.htm, dec2000.htm or
any other file names of your choice.
Alternatively, if you did not want to rename the files you could
create subdirectories under your /reportarchive directory such
as:
/reportarchive/jan2001
/reportarchive/feb2001
/reportarchive/march2001
etc.
The idea is that each weekly and monthly report has a unique
file name or directory in your archive.
If you download your report pages and don't rename or place them
in their own directory you run the risk of overwriting the
previous week's/month's report the next time you download then
since they would have identical file names.
Using Microsoft FrontPage or any other web editor you could even
create an index page with links to each archived weekly and
monthly file so you can quickly surf through all your reports.
Alternatively, you can do the same thing on your web site and
create an "online" archive.
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