[gtaSAGE-members] Commercial web analyzers

[Fraser Campbell]

On Monday 18 October 2004 15:53, Stephen Fulton wrote:

> More specifically, tracking users as they go visit a site, for a marketing
> department (which also means pretty graphics and other shiny objects to
> impress the VP).

The only way you to track users is to force logins or to use something like 
mod_usertrack (IIRC) that assigns all browsers a unique cookie.  Logging the 
cookie where standard weblogs would log an http username would give some 
results with standard log analysis tools.

Tracking individual users through a site (clicktracking) would seem to be a 
pretty intensive task.  If they want to know stuff like:

- user was referred to us by Google, they searched for keywords x+y+z 
- user entered on page A, then B, then C, etc.
- how long users "viewed" a given page.
- what was the exit page (last viewed)

Having someone actually look at that data would seem to me to be an incredible 
waste of someone's time, or maybe that's why I'm not in marketing.  If you 
actually get something set up to do this I suspect it will not be used, other 
than to kill trees.

Personally, I would find the following interesting:

- commonest (is that a word?) referrer page
- commonest search terms (assuming referrer was search engine)
- commonest entrance page
- where are your users coming from (perhaps geographical mapping of IPs, or
  worst case using PTR records)
- typical length of visits
- commonest exit page

Like I said, I'm not a marketing guy ;-)  Either way I'd probably not look to 
commercial solutions for any of the above.  I'd probably feed the logs into a 
database for ease of analysis and then design a query interface with some 
predefined queries and (possibly) the ability for a user to define their own 
queries.  Generating offline reports might be an idea but for the amount of 
times I suspect it would be used, and the diskspace it would waste, I'd just 
go with realtime generation of reports at first.

For my own log reporting requirements and those of numerous customers, I'm 
quite happy with reportmagic, it gives some fancy looking graphs but (better) 
it gives the facts in plain English (and numerals) rather than mumbo-jumbo.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser at wehave.net>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux