Traffic Log
Traffic Log is a feature that allows you to get raw visit data. Voluum reports allow you to go only so granularly in the Live Events report, but it is limited to the last 100 events. All other Voluum reports show processed data. If you need the most detailed information about every visit that has occurred, you need to use Traffic Log.
Traffic Log generates a CSV file you can view in an external program or extract more specific data using scripts. Due to possibly large amounts of data, Voluum restricts the time range of the Traffic Log to 7 day and the number of requests to 10 per day. If you need a wider time range, you can always generate several traffic logs.
Additionally, the Traffic log feature allows you to fetch data that are up to 4 months old. For example, on the 1st of September, you will not be able to generate a traffic log for data that has been generated before the 1st of May.
Why Would You Need Traffic Log?
If you have a suspicion that the traffic you buy might be invalid, you might need the highest level of granularity to analyze the traffic details yourself. A standard report does not contain information on every visit, with timestamps and IP addresses. Reports show only processed data. To get the raw data, you need Traffic Log.
Voluum Note: Note that the traffic log is based on visit details. If a visitor generates more than one click from a single visit, details of such click will not be shown in the log.
What Information Does It Contain?
Traffic Log can show you the following details for each visit:
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Additionally, it provides you with information about the Anti-Fraud Metrics (if you have the Anti-Fraud Kit feature active in your subscription plan):
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Voluum Note: Because of the changes in the data gathering process needed to be made to support extracting raw data, Traffic Log fetches correct data only from the 15th of October 2018. Any data contained in the traffic log prior to this date might not be accurate.
I. Requesting a Traffic Log
The traffic log option is ONLY available within a specific report for a campaign. After you create a specific campaign report, you can request a traffic log. The link to the report will be delivered to the email address(es) you provide. Note that generating a traffic log might take up to a few hours.
In order to request a traffic log, perform the following steps:
- In Voluum, create a specific report for a given campaign and adjust any report settings (such as grouping, drill-down, time range) to narrow down a data set.
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You can request the traffic log by the Export button and select the Traffic log option from the drop-down menu in the specific report tab. The Traffic Log pop-up window will appear.
- Select a time zone of your report from the Time zone drop-down menu.
- Provide a date range of your report by selecting start and end date in the Time range section. Note that because of large amounts of data to process you cannot select a time range longer than 7 days.
- Provide the main email address where a link to the traffic log will be sent in the Email address text field. By default, this text field will be filled with your default email address.
- Optionally, provide any additional email addresses by clicking the Add email button.
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Click the Request button.
When a traffic log is ready, you will get an email with a link that allows you to download the traffic log. To save disk space, the traffic log file is compressed using ZIP.
II. Reading a Traffic Log
To open the downloaded traffic log file, you have to decompress it first. Note that the decompressed file size might be significant. It can easily exceed the limits of most popular spreadsheet editing programs. We recommend trying one of the three ways to open the traffic log file:
- Opening it in a spreadsheet editing software (bear in mind that Microsoft Excel has a limit of approx. 1 million rows per file)
- Splitting the file into smaller ones using CSV splitters
- Using scripts to extract the most relevant data (such as Powershell scripts)
