Running a Report That Combines All the Hits to the Same Domain into a Single Entry

Summary

I want to see how many times a website has been visited, but my report keeps treating www.example.co.uk and www.example.com as two different sites. Surely they're the same?

Problem

Typically, companies use a different top-level domain (TLD), or country code, for customers in different countries, for example, www.google.com typically for the US and www.google.co.uk for the UK. Smoothwall logs these as separate URLs, and so reports as such. You can create a custom report using the Domain activity section, which has the option to combine such entries, making for a more manageable report.

Note: Combining these TLDs renders your report unsuitable for drill-down or feed-forward reporting. This is because the TLDs are only combined for that specific reporting instance; the underlying reporting data is not changed.

Solution

  1. Create a custom report as detailed in our help topic, Creating custom reports.
  2. From the Available sections box, open the Guardian3 folder.
  3. Select Domain activity and add it to the Included sections box.
  4. From the new section that appears at the bottom of the page, click the Options tab.
  5. Click Advanced.
  6. Scroll down to the URL parsing panel.
  7. Select Remove CC/TLD (.com, .co.uk).
  8. Add other relevant sections, options, and filters to the report.
  9. Scroll back to the top of the page and click Create report.

See Also