Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 8 – Examining Subsets of Traffic

Introduction

Website Analysis Tools, like Summary, provide many data-rich reports to help you understand different aspects of traffic. Once you begin to become familiar with the particular behaviors of your website traffic you will want to know more about certain groups of visits. For example, if your browser report includes a large number of hits from users browsing with mobile phones, you would want to know which particular pages on your site are most important to those visitors so you can build custome wireless versions to make access by mobile users easier and more efficient.

Summary allows you to define filters to look at subsets of your site traffic using all of the regular Summary reports. A common use of filters is to look at a particular sub-set of the content of your site. By applying a request filter you can see all your web analytics reports with statistics for traffic on just the pages in your /products/ pages or for only those hits to your online store.

Filters can also be applied to remove subsets of traffic rather than isolate them. You would use this technique to remove traffic generated by your own employees from the analytics reports.

This fine-tuning of the reports becomes an essential tool in managing advanced web analytics. As with most information, the more you discover about your visitors’ traffic patterns, the more questions will arise. By carefully applying filters and other configuration settings you can generate groups of reports to monitor specific questions that you or other people in your organization may have. In Appendix A - Making Reports More Usable, we will cover additional tricks you can use to help bring your analytics in line with the expectations of those reading the reports, thus making them more useful and informative.