Templates were created to give users a good starting point of both understanding how reporting works and get reporting results quickly. Sometimes a bit of fine tuning is needed because no two situations are the same and to get more precise results that are easier to analyze.
In this article, we'll go through a set of modifications to a specific template. The template in question is the "Executive user summary" which can be found in the "Executive summary" template folder on the Reports page.
The executive summary reports are meant for detailed analysis of a users internet activity without having to create a complete log extract. It consists of six reports that shows when users browse, what they browse, what they search for and how much time is spent browsing. The modifications listed here will clean up the report a bit by excluding technical content and also adjust the output to make it more readable by users who are not experienced with website technical content.
The modifications listed here can be used on most templates to achieve the same results giving a cleaner output.
Procedure
- Create a copy of this template to work with by clicking the floppy disk icon,
, see our help topic, Generating reports.
- Folder: Executive summary
- Report: Executive summary of activity of a specific user
- On the Custom page under these sections, make your changes to the template:
- Customize reports:
- Name: For example, Executive Summary of Hugh Grant.
- Location: Select the top level Reports folder or if you have created one for your own modified reports, choose the custom folder.
- Sections:
- Grouped options:
- Display top: "20"
- Exclude empty results: yes
- Search term matching: "Whole search phrase"
- Show results by: "Client IP"
- Exclude domain: "ytimg.com"
- Advanced»
- Exclude adverts: yes
- Session window: "2min"
- Filter out images, javascript etc: yes
- Exclude results:
- Do not include these categories: - (Include the hyphen to not report on uncategorised content. If you have any custom categories with domains you do not want to report on, add them to this list.)
- APIs & Web Libraries
- Connect for Chromebooks
- Content Delivery
- Software Updates
- SSL / CRL
- User tracking and Site stats
- Search Suggestions
- Transparent HTTPS incompatible sites
- Do not include these categories: - (Include the hyphen to not report on uncategorised content. If you have any custom categories with domains you do not want to report on, add them to this list.)
- URL parsing:
- Root domain: yes
OR
- Root domain: yes
- Time: Set the time frame. This will allow you to only see data from the specified time range. For example, Monday to Friday, each day from 8:00 to 16:00.
- Grouped options:
- Domains by Category group:
- Domain activity:
- Unit: yes - "Time spent"
- Domain activity:
- Customize reports:
- Don't forget to click Create report, under the top Customize reports section.
Running the report
When this report is run, it's always a good idea to start with a limited time frame like a week. It's a complex report so it can take some time to complete. If the one week report finishes quickly, try two weeks etc. In general, when running reports, start with a limited date range and work your way up. If a report is needed for a two month period or longer, it's better to run multiple reports, rather than just a single monolithic one because the time it takes to complete grows larger when longer date ranges are selected and it is not linear. This means that running a one week report may take 30 mins but running a two week report could then take 90 minutes.
As always, if there are any questions, please contact support. The chat function found on this knowledge base site can be used for quick questions.