One of the most common things we hear is ‘how do I report on when a site was visited’. While this poses a few potential problems, this article will look at some possible solutions.
Vantage does import and have a record of the exact date and time for every hit that is in its storages. Although it’s possible to report on this, you may end up with a very large report that has an entry for a website for every second of the day, as the date/time stamp is down to the individual second.
To make the report more meaningful, a better way to summarize this information is to report on the Date and the Hour of the Day (eg 9am – 10am) in which the site was visited. This will give you a maximum of 24 instances of each website in your table for a daily period, and will make the results easier to read.
WebSpy Vantage comes with an included report template named “User Site Listing (By Time)”, which gives you a per user breakdown of the websites visited by that user, and the date and time of the first visit to that website, so for the entire content of the report, you will only see each website listed once, even if it was visited on multiple occasions by the user.
The report is designed to be run with a filter for a single day’s data, however, you can modify the report template to add the Hour Of Day field, so that if the website was visited multiple times during the day you will see each time the site was visited. To do this:
1. Go to Modules | Reports in Vantage
2. Right-click the “User Site Listing (By Time)” template and select Edit Template
3. Double-click the All Sites By Time node
4. On the General page under Columns click Add | Key
5. Select Summary: Hour; Alias: Hours, then click OK
6. Click on the Hour column in the list, and use the arrows on the right to move the column to the position where you would like it in the table
7. Click OK to complete the modifications.
Tips:
1. Whenever you make changes to a report template, on completion of the changes, click Return To Reports on the left, then click the Save Templates link to make a copy of your changes, before running the report.
2. When you run the report, use a test storage, with only a very small amount of data in it. This will allow the report to complete quickly, and let you see whether the changes are what you expected. If they are, then you can run the report on your entire data.
See Also: Filters
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