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In what order are filters applied during analysis?

Products

Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x

Cause

During analysis, Webtrends applies filters in the following order:

Profile Hit Filters (Include)
Profile Hit Filters (Exclude)
Profile Visit Filters (Include)
Profile Visit Filters (Exclude)
Custom Report Hit Filters (Include)
Custom Report Hit Filters (Exclude)
Custom Report Visit Filters (Include)
Custom Report Visit Filters (Exclude)

Webtrends uses include filters to create a subset of included data and then exclude filters to refine that subset.

It’s also important to note that Webtrends determines individual visits after applying hit filters, but before applying visit filters. This can have the following impacts:

If a visitor spends a portion of a visit in one area of your site, goes to another area for more than the value of your session timeout, and then goes back to the original area, this will show as two visits to the original area if the second area is filtered out. If you analyzed the same data with no filters, you would have a single visit.
If you remove the first hit of the visit, you could remove the following:

  • The true initial referrer
  • Search engine and search keywords and phrases
  • Campaign ID that brought the visitor to the site.

Please keep in mind that these aren’t the only impacts. The best solution is to create a test profile and apply your configuration to that profile first. Analyze the same data to be used in production and verify the results.

More Information

Current logic allows only the following combinations for profile level filters:
If you have a Visit Include filter, the only type of Hit filters that can be applied are Exclude.
If you have a Visit Exclude filter, the only type of Hit filters that can be applied are Include.

Visit Include/Hit Excludes
Visit Exclude/Hit Includes

You cannot have the following combinations for profile level filters:
Visit Include/Hit Include
Visit Exclude/Hit Exclude