The true custom reporting flexibility available in WebTrends Analytics allows our customers the ability to report upon a number of different initiatives via the unique combinations of dimensions, measures, and filters. By providing a robust set of options at not just the dimension and filter level, but the measure level as well, it is possible to truly customize what is tracked and reported to your user base. My intention over my first few blog posts will be to provide a number of simple techniques that can be utilized and combined for such initiatives at your firm.

To use a real world example, I am going to focus upon tracking marketing efforts on social media/networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, and del.icio.us. As these and other similar sites have become a popular and cost effective way to market to both potential and existing customers, the ability to report upon the results of those efforts has become increasingly important.

In this post, I will cover the creation of a relatively simple report that uses a single dimension of Visit Duration. Prior to designing the report, we will construct a number of custom measures that will group our various Web 2.0 Campaigns into different buckets that we can then report on (in this case we will just look at Twitter and Facebook). These individual Campaigns could of course always be broken out to focus upon attribution, but the real goal of this basic example is to instead highlight some of the available flexibility when it comes to customized measures, the use of which can be quite beneficial when it comes to segmentation and high-level reporting for various user groups.

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