This article applies to:

• WebMarshal Reports

Question:

• Running a Web Usage by User report and drilling down to a user record
• The total browsing time for all domains does not equal the overall browsing time for the user

Information:

The Web Usage by User report shows totals for each User. You can drill down to show the browsing times for each domain.

Adding all of the domain browsing times does not give the same result as the overall total browsing time for the user. In most cases the sum of domain browsing times will be greater.

This result is correct. The two values are not calculated in the same way.

Total user browsing time is calculated as the difference between session start time and session end time.

However, when you expand a user record to show the individual domains, the detailed domain browsing time totals are taken from the log of requests for each domain, not the session times. 

Since most sites retrieve information from more than one domain, a user is almost certainly browsing many domains at the same time.

For both session and domain times, the "end" is based on assumptions about how long a user views each page.

The most accurate measure of "eyes on the screen" is the overall browsing time.

Notes:

More information on how browsing time is calculated can be found in Trustwave Knowledgebase article Q11755.