Filters
What is filtering and how does it affect your analysis results?
Filters give you the ability to exclude irrelevant data and zoom in on particular aspects of your web site's online activities that may otherwise be lost amid the flood of information which surrounds them. By all accounts, one of the most powerful features of Funnel Web is its ability to filter out specific portions of the data contained in your log files.
Below are a series of examples describing how you could use some of Funnel Web's more prominent filtering features to perform specific types of analyses.
Funnel Web places two different types of filters at your disposal. Include filters will filter out everything except the item specified. Exclude filters will cause the program to ignore only the items specified as you can see from the two screen shots below.
Example - Clients
Funnel Web's client filtering option can be used for relatively simple tasks like filtering out the IP addresses of users who are responsible for maintaining and updating your site.
Client filters can also assist you in maintaining the security of your site. If you suspect a particular IP number listed in your clients report belongs to a wouldbe hacker, you can use an include filter to eliminate all users except the one in question.
Example - File/URL filters
File/URL exclude filters can be used to exclude irrelevant files or file types. For example, a graphic that appears on multiple pages may seriously skew your results. You could filter out the graphic itself, or filter out all graphics by using a "wildcard" formatted as "*.gif" or "*.jpg."
A more powerful application could determine how many times an ad you have run on one of your pages has been clicked on by excluding all requests except those which pertain to the ad. A complete report would be generated focusing exclusively on that single advertisement.
If you have placed an ad on another site that links to a page exclusively devoted to incoming traffic from that ad, you could run a report that filters out all but that single page to determine the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.
Example - Referral filters
Referral exclude filters are very important in obtaining realistic glimpses into your web site's activity. First and foremost, you can use this type of filter to remove all references to referrals from your own site. This will generate a referral report listing external sites that drive traffic to your site.
Referral include filters are equally as valuable as a way of producing reports which focus only on a particular referral site, allowing you to closely examine the traffic being sent to your site from a particular partner or from a particular ad you have placed.
Example - Errors filters
Since the vast majority of server errors showing up in your report will be "404" errors (meaning the user requested a file which doesn't exist in the location specified), you may want to use an exclude filter for 404 errors. This will give you a more specific error report allowing you to identify where visitors are running into problems on your web site.
Funnel Web's easy-to-use interface makes adding any type of filter a breeze. Simply choose "include" or "exclude" to denote which type of filtering process the program should perform, select the type of entry Funnel Web should look for, then choose the logic by which it should search. Finally, drop your log files on the program and then view the report.
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