Exclusions and Parameter Masking in ClickTracks

By Amit Apte

After importing your log files, there are still many things that you can do in ClickTracks to further tweak and refine your data. In this article, we'll discuss three: Visitor Exclusions, Page Exclusions and Parameter Masking.

Excluding Visitors

Many times, especially in larger organizations, internal employees will regularly visit the company web site, or even keep the company web site as there default home page. Every time your coworkers and colleagues access the web site, their web traffic is logged in your web server's log files. This is where the problem begins-- in most cases, this 'internal' traffic doesn't represent the general public or your customers--and therefore your internal traffic is doing little more than skewing your web site statistics.

So how do you fix this colleague conundrum? ClickTracks makes it easy for you to exclude certain requests from your dataset just by indicating an IP address range. Just type in the appropriate IP addresses under Tools > Options > Exclusions.

Non-Essential Files

Typically, files like images, media content files, and executable files contribute to the marketing effort of a web site—but they also contribute to the amount of clutter collecting in your dataset. By default, ClickTracks removes requests to images, .exe files, and a few others (this is configurable through a properties file).

Beyond this, there could be other files that could also be cluttering your dataset. For example, if you have requests to any internal documents, style sheets, include files, or other oddly named files which are important to the web site, but don't figure into the analysis of your web site, these files could stand to be removed from your dataset. Use ClickTracks to remove requests to these miscellaneous files and help your dataset be more representative of your actual web traffic.

To take advantage of this exclusion, simply indicate the specific files or filetypes under Tools > Options > Exclusions.

Entire URLs

The Exclusions feature isn't just for files--ClickTracks lets you exclude entire URLs or sub-sections of your web site. Let's say you keep all of your forum files in a separate subdirectory on your web site, and you don't want forum activity to be counted in your analysis. Simply add the entire location into the exclusions dialog box and all visitor traffic to that subsection of your site will be removed from your dataset.

It's worth noting, however, that the exclusions feature is intended to exclude specific visitors (IP addresses) or files, but is not intended for excluding referring sites. In other words, the exclusions feature is NOT effective at excluding specific referrers.

Read more on this topic at: http://way.clicktracks.com/help/en/an/exclusions.htm

Parameter Masking

If you have a dynamic web site, you know that appending certain query parameters to your URLs can have a negative impact on the way you analyze your web site traffic. ClickTracks' Parameter Masking is just the right tool for the job.

Session IDs

A very common practice on the Web is to issue a session ID to every visitor who reaches your web site. As a result, a URL parameter is tacked on to the end of your web site's URL and a long session ID value is set as the value of the parameter. That's all fine and dandy until we realize this: If every URL with a new session ID value is treated as a unique URL, you will quickly see requests to millions of pages, while at the same time seeing extremely very low statistics for each URL—even though your site may has far fewer URLs and much greater traffic. What's happening here is that it's tracking each page (with its appended session ID) as a separate entity, and making a mess out of your marketing metrics in the process.

How do you fix this? We're glad you asked. Using ClickTracks' Parameter Masking feature, you simply tell ClickTracks to “mask” out the session ID parameter, therefore reducing the number of unique URLs and giving you a more accurate view of your web site statistics.

Page Defining Parameters

The Parameter Masking tool also comes in handy when tracking dynamic web sites in ClickTracks' Navigation report. Most dynamic web sites use a script page (like products.php for example) and pass in a “Page Defining Parameter” which tells the system what content to display on the page. What happens as a result is that, in the Navigation report, it may appear that all your links have the exact same amount of traffic. Why? Because the Page Defining Parameter is most probably being masked out of the analysis—the program 'thinks' that all of your links point to the same page.

By using ClickTracks' Parameter Masking tool, you can unmask the Page Defining parameter(s) that your site uses and your links' statistics will change. For example, your site might use a URL similar to the following:

www.mysite.com/products.php?id=345

If the “id” parameter is being masked out, it will appear that all your links are pointing to products.php. So, you can then unmask the “id” parameter, and every product page will be treated separately.

Parameter Masking functionality can be found in the ClickTracks application under Tools -> Dynamic Page Parameters.

Read more on this topic at: http://way.clicktracks.com/help/en/an/dynamicpageparameters.htm