CODEWITHSUNDEEP
web-analytics
Justin808
Justin808

Reputation: 21522

Website analytics - How To?

I've been contemplating adding analytics to a CMS system that I've build. I'm not looking to use a 3rd party package or service. I'm really looking to log page visits by visitor and time.

I am not trying to determine a person or to track beyond the single site. I would like to know if the visitor is the same one as yesterday though.

I'm thinking of a simple table storing the time, the page id and a visitor hash (md5 or something). this would let me say "visitor X comes to the site every 5 days" type of thing and to be able to say that visitor Y went from page 1 to 2 to 14 back to 1 as well as other statistics.

time and page id I can get easily, its the visitor ID. i can get the IP, but that track a single visit through the site. It can't be reliably used to track return visit. NATs an DHCP make using the IP undesirable - I think. I guess i could use a client side cookie, but I would rather not.

Is there a reliable, or more reliable than IP, way to identify return visitors?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 215

Answers (2)

Is Learning English
Is Learning English

Reputation: 268

As far as I know, there are only two ways to track visitors, one is cookies and another is IP address. I also heard some thing like adding 1px*1px gif image, I am not sure how it works though. One thing need notice is web analytics is based on vague data, does not like CRM analytics at all. So if you are looking accurate data, then it is almost impossible to do.

Just a thought

Upvotes: 0

Sampsa Suoninen
Sampsa Suoninen

Reputation: 624

Except using GA to track unique visitors relies on the custom variables and can't really be used like described above.

I would take a look at Piwik, it's free and more flexible than GA.

If you really want to build a system of your own, the client side cookie set to expire in 10 years or so ("permanent") which contains time and page id (and maybe visit id, but you would have to use session info for that) and a unique visitor ID which doesn't change.

Do note that without using e.g. a username to track the visitor, you are only tracking unique browsers, not visitors.

Upvotes: 0

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