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Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x
Introduction:
Unlike hit filters, which filter activity based on the occurrence of certain criteria in each line of the log file, visit filters include or exclude activity based on the point at which the session began, for its entirety. Visit filters should be used when the focus is to view aggregate visitor data by session, and they are most useful when a web server is serving cookies because more accurate session tracking information increases the applicability of the filter to be applied.
The three types of visit filters are as follows:
Entry page – based on the page on which the visitor enters the site and initiates the session
Referrer – based on the page from which the visitor arrived, such as a search engine
Campaign – based on predefined campaign identifiers associated with the visit
When specifying a referrer filter, enter the referring URL to be tracked. Once the filter is applied to a profile and the analysis is run, the program sessionizes the log file into visits, and the first hit of each visit will be checked to see if it matches the pattern(s) specified in the referrer filter. If it matches, the entire visitor session that began with the matching hit will be included/excluded from the report. The process is the same for entry page filters (except that the entry page of the visitor session is checked to see if it matches the filter). The campaign visit filter differs from referrer and entry page filters in that the campaign filter requires a campaign definition be created in advance, to which it can then be applied to the campaign filter. The campaign definition specifies an entry page or referrer and also includes an option to specify additional parameters associated with the campaign(s) to which they apply.