Online Marketing Trends

With MCMS2002 you have Channels and Postings; a Channell contains one or more Postings. A Channel has a default Posting which is being displayed when you request the Channelname in the browser.

Example; Channel /ETV/Utrecht/ (http://www.etv.nl/ETV/Utrecht) is the homepage for the Utrecht “Venster” of ETV. It will display the Posting /ETV/Utrecht/Utrecht.htm as this is set as default Posting.

Now, both http://www.etv.nl/ETV/Utrecht and http://www.etv.nl/ETV/Utrecht/Utrecht.htm will show exactly the same content. When analyzing the Pages report in WebTrends, both URL’s will occur:

Now this is not an ideal situation because you just want totals without having to pick your calculator. These were two options I figured out;

1. Use WebTrends’ URL Search/Replace
For every Channel you have to make a definition that adds the name of the Posting to the Channel URL. So it rebuilds the records in the logfile from http://www.etv.nl/ETV/Utrecht/ to http://www.etv.nl/ETV/Utrecht/Utrecht.htm. The disadvantage is that we have a lot of Channels in this site. Every time a Channel has been made or has been changed, you will have to add a new URL Search/Replace definition or change it.

2. Use Script URL in Microsoft Content Management Server 2002
Redirect all traffic initially destined for a Channel to the Posting-url. You can do this with the “Script URL” property of a Channel. In this field you specify the URL of a redirectpage, the redirectpage handles the request and forwards it to the Posting-URL.

The disadvantage is that you are introducing a redirect in your site and redirects are a no-no for search engines. To decrease most of the negative points, we use a 301 Moved Permanently redirect instead of the 302 you’d use when you do a Response.Redirect;

        private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
        {
            Channel currentChannel = CmsHttpContext.Current.Channel;
            string defaultPosting = currentChannel.DefaultPostingName;
            if (defaultPosting != “”)
            {
                if (currentChannel.Postings[defaultPosting] != null)
                {
                    Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
                    Response.AddHeader(“Location”,currentChannel.Postings[defaultPosting].Url);
                }
            }
        }

As final touch we add a filter to the WebTrends report to exclude all hits with errorcode 301 and the job is done. With little amount of work we built a generic solution for proper Page reports.

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www.omtrends.com

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under WebTrends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.