In my last post, I provided an overview of the different pieces that make up a complete URL and explained some of the reasons why each piece is important. Today, I’m going to describe a more advanced concept - URL pruning. Many people will never have to deal with URL pruning, but it's a concept that is worth understanding nonetheless.

The basic idea of URL pruning is that a standard part of a URL is extracted from the URL before the analysis of the clickstream data. For example, consider the following URLs from an imaginary Web site:

www.example.com/products/index.html www.example.com/products/sesid:12345678/index.html www.example.com/products/sesid:87654321/index.html www.example.com/products/sesid:13572468/index.html

Now, how many different pages of the Web site were viewed? From a strict definition of a Web page - a unique URL - there were 4 different pages since each URL is different from the others. The only difference between them is the presence of the string 'sesid:' and an 8 digit number. It turns out that on this imaginary Web site, the string is used to identify a user session. So, from a marketer's perspective (and a visitor's), there is only one unique Web page. This is an important difference. In order to gain an accurate measure and understanding of your visitors' behavior, you will need to remove the session id string - this is called URL pruning.

Another case where URL pruning may be needed is if there are multiple paths to the same page. A site redesign, for example, might restructure a Web site so that the URL: www.example.com/products/pages/index.html is now simply: www.example.com/products/index.html. Again, since a visitor experiences each unique URL as the same page, it's useful to prune out the “/pages” portion of the URL from the old version of the Web site.

If you are fortunate (or far sighted) enough to have a Web site that is well structured for Web analytics , URL pruning might never be an issue for you. However, for sites that require it, this is a key piece of functionality that can make the difference between misleading data and actionable data.

For more information, check out the ClickTracks Support article URL Pruning, and our URL pruning test tool.

Next time, we’ll examine a related topic - parameter masking and exclusions.

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