Products
Webtrends Analytics 9.x
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Issue
How do “nojavascript” entries affect Webtrends reports?
Resolution
When a visitor has JavaScript disabled, their hits execute the section of the Webtrends tag. How do these hits impact Webtrends reports?
Page Views and Visits:
The Overview Dashboard reports the number of page views and visits for your profile overall. This will include both metrics for users with JavaScript disabled. Our mechanism for tracking visitors reliably does rely on cookies, but will still operate when JavaScript is disabled, so these figures are both still accurate, including “nojavascript” hits.
The Pages Report:
You will see a page URL that ends in “/nojavascript”. Example: http://www.yourdomain.com/nojavascript
This entry is not an actual page on your site; it is a “virtual” URL generated by the Webtrends tag. will display the aggregate number of visits, page views, and other metrics for users with JavaScript disabled. If a visitor with JavaScript disabled visits your site and views 6 different URLs, none of those individual URLs will reflect that data in the Pages report – instead, this row in the Pages report will reflect 1 visit and 6 views. You will notice that the number of visits and page views for this row in the Pages report will be very similar to the visits and page views reported in the JavaScript Support report.
The Entry Pages and Exit Pages Reports:
While visitors with JavaScript enabled will reflect a wide range of possible entry and exit pages, users who do not execute JavaScript always report the same virtual URL for every page view, leaving them with only one possible entry page, and only one possible exit page: /nojavascript. As a result, you will find that this virtual URL will appear in your entry and exit pages reports with numbers roughly equal to the number of visits with JavaScript disabled reported in the JavaScript Support report. If your normal visitors are spread over a broad range of other entry and exit pages, this URL may be ranked very highly in the reports based on entry and exit pages.
Path Analysis Reports:
Again, while normal users will visit a wide variety of different URLs on your site, all of which will be individually reported to Webtrends, users with JavaScript disabled will always report visiting the same virtual URL over and over again. This leads to a very common path appearing in various path analysis reports: the /noscript virtual URL, combined with a number of entry page, exit page, and page refresh actions. Only very rarely will /noscript be followed by any other URL, and these represent unusual corner cases caused by oddities with browser behavior or user activity.
The JavaScript Support Report:
This is a key report for identifying users with JavaScript disabled. It divides the visits and page views to your site among those with JavaScript enabled vs. JavaScript disabled. Reviewing the numbers inthis report will provide a baseline for understanding the impact of “nojavascript” hits on the rest of your reports. However, it is important to note that due to unexpected variations in browsers, these numbers will almost never match the other reports exactly.
More Information
While it is possible to remove the section from the tag, we recommend using profile or report filters to limit the data instead in order to provide more flexibility both in the present, and to adapt to changing conditions in the future.