WebTrends and WAA Standards Definitions

|

Attended the Web Analytics Association (WAA) webcast this morning, caught up on what the Standards Committee has been working on and reviewed the updated definitions being proposed for 2008. Great discussions from the panelists following questions posed from the audience.  One of the new inclusions in the standards document is “Ask Your Vendor” questions, which highlights areas where calculations are done in differently across analytics solutions. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the final version of the scenarios referred in the webcast and in Angie’s interview with Eric Peterson this week, so we can provide our answers and/or approach.

The document will remain in a draft state and open for comments until December 31, 2008.  Until then, we are publishing our compliance with the current WAA standards for WebTrends Analytics 8.6 (releasing over the weekend). As mentioned in the webcast – you can find the same from other solutions providers: Dennis for Yahoo! IndexTools, Justin (from EpikOne) on behalf of Google Analytics, Greg for Mobiliytics and Akin from Unica ( who released their comparison this week along with the request that all analytics providers “not shy away from revealing how their solutions comply” ).

We provided this mapping of our definitions this past September for an upcoming CMS Watch report and it follows the format that Dennis did earlier in the year.

Compliant? Term WAA Definition WebTrends – Additional Details
Yes Page A page is an analyst definable unit of content.
Yes Page Views The number of times a page (an analyst-definable unit of content) was viewed.
Yes Visit/Sessions A visit is an interaction, by an individual, with a website consisting of one or more requests for an analyst-definable unit of content (i.e. “page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the visit session will terminate. If a visitor has left a site or has not executed a click within 30 minutes, the visit session will terminate. Fully configurable to other time periods
Yes Unique Visitors The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period. As “Visitors”
Yes New Visitor The number of Unique Visitors with activity including a first-ever Visit to a site during a reporting period. WebTrends also tracks visitors who don’t accept cookies as ‘Visitors Not Accepting Cookies”
Yes Repeat Visitor The number of Unique Visitors with activity consisting of two or more Visits to a site during a reporting period. As “Visitor who visited more than once”
Yes Entry Page The first page of a visit.
Yes Landing Page A page intended to identify the beginning of the user experience resulting from a defined marketing effort. WebTrends uses “Entry page” in a separate campaign area to support marketing efforts as suggested by WAA.
Yes Exit Page The last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit/session. As “Exit Page”
Yes Visit Duration The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session. As “Avg. Visit Duration”
Yes Referrer The referrer is the page URL that originally generated the request for the current page view or object. As “Referring Page.” WebTrends also provides referring site and referring domain
Yes Internal Referrer The internal referrer is a page URL that is internal to the website or a web-property within the website as defined by the user. As “Referring Page”
Yes External Referrer The external referrer is a page URL where the traffic is external or outside of the website or a web property defined by the user. As “Referrer”
Yes Visit Referrer The visit referrer is the first referrer in a session, whether internal, external or null. As “Referring Page”
Yes Original Referrer The original referrer is the first referrer in a visitor’s first session, whether internal, external or null. As “Initial Referrer”
Yes Click-through Number of times a link was clicked by a visitor.
Yes Click-through Rate/Ratio The number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.
Yes Page Views per Visit The number of page views in a reporting period divided by number of visits in the same reporting period.
Yes Page Exit Ratio Number of exits from a page divided by total number of page views of that page. Supported with calculation or configuration
Yes Single-Page Visits Visits that consist of one page regardless of the number of times the page was viewed.
Yes Single Page Visits that consist of one page view.
Yes Bounce Rate Single page view visits divided by entry pages. Supported with calculation or configuration
Yes Event Any logged or recorded action that has a specific date and time assigned to it by either the browser or server. Supported with calculation or configuration
Yes Conversion A visitor completing a target action. WebTrends provides multiple conversion types

A note to our readers: I look forward to seeing the uber-compliance mapping across all the analytics providers which I’m sure one of you will jump on once all the definitions are available online.

  • Pingback: Web Analytics Demystified » Blog Archive » WAA Standards Update: Thursday, November 6th

  • http://gotanalytics.blogspot.com Chris Grant

    Question for you, Michele (but first, THANK YOU for doing this!) —

    For Visit Duration, or rather Average Visit Duration, are zero-length visits (i.e. single page visits) included in the “total visits” number that is the denominator of the calculation?

  • Nick Potter

    Another question for you!

    Considering that the industry as a whole seems to be moving away from page views and back to server requests as a result of Web 2.0 and AJAX implementations how is this going to affect the definition of “Page View” or “Page”?

  • Rainn

    “Visit Duration – The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.”
    the problem with this calculation is when trying to analyze landing pages stats – if the person does not convert there is no second page so there is no data on how long that visitor spent on the site. Since most do not convert a lot of important statistics is lost.
    Same goes to bounce rate. In order to know your real stats you should use a tool like http://www.pagealizer.com

  • http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org angie

    Michele, THANKS for posting, this is very helpful!

    I look forward to meeting you on our next meeting, and thank you for your participation.

    Angie Brown
    Co-Chair, WAA Standards

  • http://blog.webtrends.com Michele Warther

    Chris – Thanks. There were lots of great discussions that happened while we were putting it together. I’m eager to dig into the next version.

    Re: Average Visit Duration – No, single-page visits are not included in the total visits in the denominator of the calculation. However, single-page visits ARE included in the total number of visits and in the total visits in the denominator of the calculation for Average Page Views Per Visit.

    Angie – You are more than welcome. We appreciate all the WAA does, it helps raise the profile of the entire industry and that benefits all of us.

    I participated in establishing IAB standards when I was on the agency/client-side and recall the relief when companies we were advertising with finally spoke the same language. Literally 1000′s of hours were saved in re-sizing graphics alone!

  • Pingback: Asociación Española de Analítica Web

  • Pingback: Ask your vendor « Blog2puntocero

  • http://www.webtrends.com April Moore

    Just saw a couple of things here I’d like to speak to…

    In regards to Nick’s point, I think as practitioners we will all have to keep ourselves focused on the user and what they experience. Terminology aside, if a user clicks on something do they think of that as a server call? or a page view? or just a click? It really depends on the particular functionality. What about just thinking about them as one of a series of events in our relationship with the user? In the end, how it impacts the user’s relationship with our site is the really important bit.

    I think whatever new terms come about, if we keep that always at the forefront, we’ll be able to deliver worthwhile insight.

    In regards to Rainn’s point, I agree a lot of statistics are lost for pages that are the only page visited in the session. But are they truly important statistics if the user did not convert? If the visitor did not convert, then its likely the landing page was ineffective, regardless of how long they had the page open in their browser. Not that that excuses technology for letting all of us down, but I think a way to work around this problem is to focus analysis on the landing pages that DO work, rather than those that don’t. Testing marketing creative in advance on users is another way to ensure these pages are at least marginally effective before the money is spent.

  • Rainn

    @April – I think that any stat that can be collected is important as you never know what new piece of data will give you the insight, new thought, new path to create better websites and landing page. This is especially true in landing pages since they are the main sources of revenue. lack of data regarding these “first page visits” lead to wrong decisions, loss of time and loss of $. The page might be converting but it is possible it can convert better, a long landing page for one source of traffic might convert while it converts poorly for other sources of traffic etc.