ConverTastictm

Where are Your Conversions REALLY Coming From?

The Filters Window Help Page

These filters only affect the request part of the server-log entry. So, you can filter out things like favicon requests, but not individual IP addresses, user-agents, etc. The purpose of these filters is to reduce the size of your databases by not importing log entries that don't provide any useful information, and to reduce clutter as you study search results.

Here is what a favicon request looks like:

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1

These come from browsers asking your web server for the little icon to show. You will see zillions of these in your server logs, and you can ignore them. Right above or below the favicon request, will be another request with the actual page the user was visiting; who cares if their browser requested an icon or not?

The same is true for your company logo which you probably have on every page. You may also have other graphics, scripts, etc. that are requested with every page. Filtering these things out can make handling your data much easier.

If you are not sure what things you should filter, don't filter anything initially. Just wait until something starts to annoy you by cluttering up your search results, and then make a filter for it.

Import Filters

On the left side of the window are the import filters. These are applied by the Import window when you import your server-log files. On top, you see the "Always Import" items. If you create one of these, ConverTastic will ignore all of the suppress filters when it finds a log entry containing the always-import filter. An example might be if you have a cookie that records the date a visitor first arrived on your site. You would never want to take a chance of accidentally suppressing that cookie, so make an always-import filter for it using the cookie's identifier. (You may need to discuss this with your webmaster.)

At the bottom-left, you see the "Suppress During Import" filters. Most people will want to create a filter for favicon.ico as discussed above. It is best to use the full name of the file in the filter to prevent additional log-entries from being skipped. For example, if you only used "favicon" and also had on your site a web page explaining what a favicon is named "favicon-explanation.html", that page would be skipped also. You should also use the full path of files if there are other files with the same name in other directories that you don't want to suppress. For example, if you had a banner image in each directory on your site, and you only wanted to suppress one of them, you would want to use something like: "directory1/banner.gif" as your filter. If you only used "banner.gif", all of the other ones in other directories would also be skipped.

Search Filters

On the right side of the window are the search filters. These are applied when you click the Search button on the Search window. These work exactly like the import filters discussed above. You may want to keep every log-entry in your databases for the sake of completeness, but not want to have your search results cluttered up. If so, don't use any import filters, but use search filters instead.