ExtraWatch Nightly Email Reports

While most of what we’ve covered thus far deals with the more live functions of JoomlaWatch’s traffic reporting features, let’s not forget that convenient summaries are one enticing piece of the puzzle. That’s what you’ll get in the case of email reports, a fully customizable feature of JoomlaWatch that you’ll want to configure to your own settings and likings. Let’s take a look at this configurations and features so you can customize your own email reporting experience with JoomlaWatch.

Overview

Open up “Emails” under the top bar or go to Components -> JoomlaWatch -> Email Reports to bring up the same page we’ll be dealing with here. You should see a table that looks a little something like this:



This is the top of the Email Reports page, and as you can see, a lot of configurations and settings are built right in. First, let’s take a look at the “Email Reports” tables and see what you can customize through those settings.

Email Reports

Since the name of the page is, after all, Email Reports, it only stands to reason that the first thing you’ll configure is how you deal with your email reports. Here is where you can change some of the most central options to the Email Reports features:



On the top, you’ll see a simple checkmark for enabling nightly emails with reports from the previous day. As you can see here, we have ours enabled, but if you don’t want to receive reports that often, you can simply leave this box unchecked.

Below that option, you can fill in the email address at which you want to receive these reports – nothing out-of-the-ordinary to report here.
Next, you see the EMAIL_NAME_TRUNCATE option. This is simply an option that allows you to change the maximum characters of the email row name; this comes in handy if your individual email program has limited options and you need to configure the email itself.

Email Value Filters

The next section of settings and features allows you to change the values of reports in the email itself. Essentially, you are whittling down the information you receive in each email report by telling Email Reports when to exclude certain information. Let’s take a look:

In each function, you’re entering in the value (generally a percentage, though you don’t want to include the actual percentage sign) that configures the rows and traffic reports you’ll see in the email.

Note that setting this value to 0 simply deactivates the individual information, taking it out of the report email. We have a number of these settings already set to “0” when it comes to these email value filters.

If you want to receive other information (relating to SEO) as opposed to the basic traffic information of your site, you can enable the SEO night email reports by toggling the box underneath “Email Value Filters”:

Also, be sure to hit “Save” after you make any changes so that your changes to the email report function will actually take effect.

A Glimpse of What to expect

Okay, so are all the boxes you’ve already seen a little confusing? If that’s the case, we can take a look at information from a sample report to let you know what you can expect to see in your email reports. (Note: you’ll see a sample of your own when you log in to Email Reports and scroll to the bottom of the page.)
Here’s what you’ll see upon first looking at the “generated filtered email report from yesterday”:

This basic information – unique hits, loads, and overall ll hits – includes information such as the 1-day change from the previous day, the weekly change, and a 28-day change that essentially correlates with a monthly change.

If you’re regularly logging in to your JoomlaWatch, there’s a good chance that you already know these basic numbers. Even so, the Email Report can function as a great “summary” at the end of the day that gives you the actual context of the entire day.
From there, your email report will feature statistics that strongly correlate to what you’re able to browse regularly on JoomlaWatch:

As you can see, the report automatically sorts each of the variables by their popularity. As you can see, the page “user/register” was the most popular page of the day for the current report. Not only is the value of how many times the page was hit displayed, but the overall percentage of how valuable this page to your website is located immediately to the right. This is similar for “Referers” and “Keyphrases” as well – all of the numbers you’re looking at essentially mean the same thing.
It’s important to note right now that these variables will look different as you edit your email report settings, which we discussed earlier. You can exclude certain pages from these reports if you don’t need to review their information on a regular basis.

Let’s continue exploring.

As you can see, the variables that are measured in the daily report strongly correspond to the variables you can check on your own, such as in the Graphs and Trends function of JoomlaWatch. Viewing this generated report at Email Reports is actually a good way to get a daily summary of the traffic you received if you don’t actually want to receive nightly emails.
There are more variables that are measured here too, including Users, Browsers, and Operating Systems. But since you probably get the gist of what Email Report numbers are all about, we didn’t include those in the screenshots.

Conclusion

Configuring your email report options is a pretty straightforward process. How your email reports ultimately end up looking is up to you and your preferences; if you want to see a total range of everything going on your site, you can configure each variable to include up to 100 percent. But give it some time to whittle down the statistics you truly want to see in your email inbox every night; you might just find out that you use JoomlaWatch’s other features enough to justify not even receiving email reports every night. Through customization, the choice is up to you.

• < Prev
• Next >