Using GFI WebMonitor to track user activity is an important part of keeping employees focused on productive tasks. However, it's also vital to distinguish between intentional and unintentional web activity.

For example, if a user heads to a social media site, that’s wasting company time. But if they are researching a product and the site they visit has embedded social media, you don’t want to incorrectly tell them they’ve breached company policy. So how can you tell when employees are deliberately goofing off, and when they are engaged in legitimate corporate tasks? To do that you need to exclude advertisements and social media referrals from your reporting, and GFI WebMonitor gives you that functionality out of the box.

You can set up and manage policies that will block web advertisement content from displaying, as well as giving you more accurate surf time reports. You can also edit your reports to exclude CDN and web advertisement data. With full URL logging you can also see intentional access patterns. For example, if you are seeing URLs such as Facebook.com appear, you know the user has directly accessed the social media site. However, sites that have cdn in the URL are often embedded social media commands, such as “Like” or “Share”. By cutting out these noise requests you can gain a clear insight in to exactly how the Internet is being used within your company, utilizing the powerful and granular web filtering capabilities of GFI WebMonitor to their best effect. And that allows you to take effective, and appropriate action, ensuring your company stays in control of its resources.