Troubleshooting analytics and reporting

Analytics update issues

Analytics update issues can show up in a number of ways:

  • Analytics reports that have empty data, or empty data beyond a certain date.

  • Analytics reports where the search keyword reports are generated but click reports are empty.

  • Search keyword reports that display weird queries.

  • Search keyword reports that

  • Trend alert reports that are empty for all periods.

  • Location reports that indicate all traffic coming from a specific location.

  • Location reports that show internal IP addresses.

This article provides advice on troubleshooting issues that affect search analytics.

Search query reports

How are counts calculated in the query reports?

Funnelback records a search for every query run, but will ignore any queries that have a start rank > 1. This means views of pages 2 and above of the search results are not counted in the query reports.

All queries coming from a single or small number of IP addresses.

This is likely to be a poor integration where all traffic is coming via another system (e.g. the search is run via a CMS which makes the request to Funnelback on behalf of the user). For this type of integration it is important that the system sends an X-Forwarded-For header along with the search query so that the correct remote address is logged by analytics.

The update the X-Forwarded-For header value plugin can be used to remove the first or last value of the X-Forwarded-For header, or all values but the first.

Blacklisted IP addresses and queries showing in analytics reports

Changes to the reporting blacklist require search analytics to be rebuilt for the changes to be retrospectively applied.

Trend alert reports

Empty trend alert reports

Empty trend alert reports could be caused by:

  • This could be an issue with trend alerts updating (check the logs)

  • It is also possible that no spikes have been detected in the logged queries as there are a number of factors which combine to generate a trend alert.

Content auditor reports