Report Monkey Tips: How to Use Shared Bookmarks in Web Analytics

Another question I hear all the time in class: “How can I pull reports for specific product or business lines for my marketers?” And rather than the my stock non-answer of “it depends,” I have a very concrete answer: Shared bookmarks. That is, you can run searches or queries on the reports and bookmark the results. Then you can put those bookmarks on business-line-specific templates.

For example, let’s say you want separate Pages reports for three different business lines: motorcycle clothes for kids, men, and women. I’ll use some old sample data we have in one of our classes, from Motorcycle Superstore for these examples. Using bookmarks, you could create a separate Pages report for each one, then tie it to a template! Let me show you how.

Start by opening the Pages report:

Then, using the Search function, search for what’s the pattern in these URLs. For kids’s clothes, for example, we’ll search for anything containing kids in the URL:

and we get this report:

Now, we bookmark the report, calling it something like “Kid’s clothing pages.” We go to the bookmark section of our Table of Contents and click Create Bookmark:

That’ll give us this window, which we’ll fill in with a name for the bookmark and click Share Bookmark.

Why Share Bookmark? Because that, as the window explains, will make this report available to anyone who has access to this template (in this case, Complete View V8). In your case, you might want to put it on a template specifically for your buyers or your marketers. I’ll talk a little more about templates in an upcoming post.

And look! That report shows up in our Table of Contents!

Now anyone who can use this template can also view this report. It’s saved, and it works like any other report. Now you can:

• Export from it
• Email it
• Schedule a regular export or email
• Pull it up and navigate through time periods using the calendar

What if, however, we didn’t have such a clean set of URLs? What if, for example, these were examples of URLs?

http://www.motorcycle-superstore.com/6/26/CDV/Casual-Girls-Clothing-Closeouts.aspx

http://www.motorcycle-superstore.com/2/8/26/1/0/0/DEPARTMENT/Dirt-Bike-Motocross-Gloves-Childrens-Riding-Gear.aspx

http://www.motorcycle-superstore.com/9/46/529/1/0/0/DEPARTMENT/Snow-Random-Apparel-Kids-Riding-Gear.aspx

Okay — a little harder, but still not so bad. I’d use a query for this one, where I look for any URl that contains kid, children, girl, or boy (not in the above, but I bet it’s around somewhere on our site). I’d go back to the Pages report, click Query here:

And drag and drop to create that query, like so:

When done, I’d click Run Query, and I’d get a report I can bookmark and share!

One caveat: the bookmark functionality works differently in Insight.webtrends.com, so this isn’t portable to that view of your data.

Also, this works best when you have templates specific to these marketing or purchasing teams, so my next blog post will talk about creating those templates.

Anyone else got some interesting, creative uses of bookmarks they’d like to share? Or tips you’d like to see about being more efficient with your web analytics?

Webtrends believes strongly that “running reports” is a vital, yet frequently inefficient part of the job. Through our on-going training, this blog, and cool new analytics features, we want to make reporting easier and faster. In turn, that will let you focus on more important things like exploring your data to make creative correlations, and find profitable insights. So if you have ideas or comments or questions, please leave a comment below.