CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticsanalyticsweb-analyticsadobe-analytics
JohnMathews
JohnMathews

Reputation: 183

Tracking a product's web interface with Google Analytics

My company creates hardware products that are sold throughout the world. They have an embedded webserver that allows for users to configure the product via a web interface. I wanted to enhance the user experience of this interface and the first step would be to start gathering analytics on how users move throughout the tool.

My question is how I should do this since there won't be a domain and instead some internal IP address that is used to access the product. For example, if their IT team installs the printer on 10.10.10.10, they almost never associate that with an internal server name and users would access the web configuration tool by directly hitting the IP. Even if they did create an internal server name like "config.productname.com", I would have no way of knowing what that would be.

This means I can't create a profile in GA to start accepting this analytic data. Has anyone done something similar in the past or have advice on how to address this issue?

Could the issue be resolved by using SiteCatalyst instead?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 106

Answers (2)

Gigazelle
Gigazelle

Reputation: 1389

SiteCatalyst provides the capability to store visitor information inside any cookie of your choosing, and does not care which domain you place code on. Ultimately all data is sent to a subdomain of 2o7.net, however you can create a CNAME record so your site stores and writes cookies to any domain of your choice.

Within the s_code.js file, there is a variable defined that governs the domain the cookie is set:

s.trackingServer="yourorganizationname.2o7.net";

It would not matter where this implementation was tracking data from, they would all use the exact same cookie location, and be treated as the same visitor no matter which domain they viewed. Just keep in mind this is defined as a third-party cookie, and small portion of browsers reject 3rd-party cookies by default.

Upvotes: 2

Jamey Sharp
Jamey Sharp

Reputation: 8491

You might try Piwik or Open Web Analytics since you can deploy them on your own infrastructure and could modify them to meet your requirements.

If you have a serial number assigned to each device during manufacturing, you may want to use that to distinguish between devices, regardless of which analytics tools you use.

Note that as far as I can tell, Google Analytics doesn't actually care what domain you place the code on; they just use your domain specification to determine what sites the tracking cookies will be delivered to. That may not help you as you probably want the tracking cookies to work, but I point it out in case it turns out to be useful...

Upvotes: 1

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