In Parts 1 and 2 of this three-part "Getting to know your URLs" series of posts we've dissected a URL to understand the different pieces that it make up, and gone into some depth about the concept of URL pruning. In Part 3, we'll take a look at a related topic - parameter masking.

Really, the full term is "URL query parameter masking". As you know from the first post, a query parameter is a way of passing information to the server in the form of a name value pair that’s appended to the end of a URL. Here’s an example:

[http://www.example.com/products/index.html?SID=12321&category=bikes&item=road&refresh=1]

Just like the URL pruning example, there are some items in the query parameter that probably aren’t useful for defining a unique page. By 'masking' a query parameter you can exclude a particular parameter (or even parameter values) from the statistical calculations in order to get a more clear and accurate report for each Web page.

Every Web site is different so you really need to understand what the URL parameters mean in order to determine which parameters should be masked and which should be kept. In the example above, the parameters 'SID' and 'refresh' are probably not page defining and should be masked. The others, 'category' and 'bikes' are used to define the particular Web page (much like a directory and file relationship) and should be kept. So, this would mean that the functional URL that is measured is:

[http://www.example.com/products/index.html?category=bikes&item=road]

One useful feature of Lyris HQ Web Analytics is that it has patented technology that automatically configures your dataset so that most non-page defining parameters are automatically masked. This is always configurable by the dataset admin, but it goes a long way in getting clear and accurate statistics.

Another neat feature of Lyris HQ Web Analytics is that even if you mask a query parameter you will still have the option of creating segments based on that query parameter. This is great news because it means that you can track specific visitor types without letting those query parameters interfere with page level stats. A hypothetical example would be a Web site that includes a visitor's zip code as a query parameter in order to display a local weather widget on a page. This parameter should be masked so that it isn’t a page defining parameter, but a segment based on a particular zip code might be very useful to investigate.

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