All this week I have been attending Webtrends Marketing Lab training. For those od you that don’t know what webtrends is – it’s an expensive yet very comprehensive analytics package.

I know a lot of my readers probably would prefer to have Google Anlytics, which is still a very powerfull tool (and free) but webtrends is a massive program which is very customisable. With many clients it proves a more fitting solution.

Until now I hadn’t really considered there might be negative implications of adding tags to pages – well there is, so be careful.

Webtrends allows you to to add perameters to pages enabling something called “Smartview” which is essentially a site overview. However you can display paths, actions, conversions and all kinds of other data. This is achieved by adding the WT.svi parameter – when you do this you are creating a duplicate page – which obviously can have a negative impact on search results.

Something to bare in mind when setting up any analtics software!