092995 - Updated Geotrends data provider for 2010

For products:
Webtrends On Demand

Webtrends Analytics 9.2a On Premises
Webtrends Analytics 8.7d
Webtrends Analytics 8.5x

Last modified: 08/16/2010

Introduction:
To ensure that we provide our customers with up-to-date and accurate reporting, we are switching to a new data provider for our Geotrends database starting December 30, 2009. With this changeover, you should see improved accuracy when it comes to your geographic reporting as well as a reduction in the number of unresolved IP addresses. Here is a quick summary of the modifications you should be aware of:

•    Overall accuracy will be improved, as we have switched to the market leader for geographical lookup data, which is constantly updating their information

•    MSA and PMSA fields will no longer be populated.  The US Census Bureau is no longer maintaining these concepts.  These fields will be replaced in a future release with more relevant data fields, such as the currently-maintained CBSA (Core Based Statistical Areas) and CSA (Combined Statistical Areas).The network report dimension will no longer be populated

•    DMA data will now have abbreviated city names and the states will be separated by dashes as opposed to commas

•    Reporting of AOL traffic whose user locations cannot be identified will now indicate "AOL" as the city name and the state/province name

•    A larger number of individual cities will be identified; this will cause web site traffic numbers to be spread across more cities

•    Some city names will have different spellings; Saint Louis, Missouri will be displayed as St Louis;  Nurnberg, Germany will be displayed as Nuremberg;  Milano, Italy, will be displayed as Milan.

•    In Analytics/Insight, more countries will have the state/region/province field populated; in countries outside of US/Canada, the state/region/province name will appear as the short ISO-3166-2 code

•    In VDM/Warehouse, several state/region/province names in the "state" field will be changed (4 names in Brazil, 4 names in China), but the same 8 countries as before will have this field populated:  US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, UK

•    In VDM/Warehouse, several country names will change.  Most notably "USA" will now appear as "United States"

•    Time zones will now always be reported as GMT +/- offsets

•    Network type will be populated with updated dimension values

•    Throughput will be populated with updated dimension values

•    Organization will be populated with updated dimension values

For more detailed information please reference the attached PDF document.

This change takes effect for Webtrends On Demand customers starting December 30, 2009. For software customers, download the new Geotrends .dat file, stop all Webtrends services, then replace the existing version, found in the WebTrends\modules\GeoTrends folder. This updated file can only be applied to WebTrends v8.5 and later.

To update the Geotrends data you will need to download the new .dat file. It is currently available at:

http://product.webtrends.com/GeoTrends/Download/GeoTrends.8.201008.dat

or via FTP protocol from the following URL:

ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/geotrends/Datafile/GeoTrends.8.201008.dat

Once you have the .dat file downloaded, you can deploy it with the following steps:
 
1. Stop all “Webtrends – Scheduler Agent” services on all nodes.
2. Stop all “Webtrends – Geotrends Server” services on all nodes.
3. On the server running Geotrends, rename Webtrends\modules\geotrends\geotrends.dat file to geotrends.old.
4. Move the GeoTrends.8.201008.dat file into this directory and rename it to “geotrends.dat”.
5. Restart the “Webtrends – Geotrends Server” services.
6. Restart the “Webtrends – Scheduler Agent” services.