[ic] hyperlink click tracking best method?

[Andrew C.]

March 25, 2003

Hello IC group.  I am interesting in either developing a scheme to track
hyperlinks and pages that are accessed or using 3rd party software.  Can
anyone with experience or knowledge in this area provide me with any
information you may have?  Basically I would like to know who is
clicking what on our site and from where they are getting to it.  I do
not know if Interchange has some features that aid in doing something
like this or what the best direction to go is.  My initial thought is to
write every link with a key on it (based on the page name and a unique
identifier) that when clicked would write a record to a table based on
the person's username (if applicable), date/time, and link followed.  I
would than periodically condense the data or move it to a machine that
would just be used for analysis so the server would not get too bogged
down with millions of records.

I am relatively new to Interchange and also may have made some poor
initial thoughts so feel free to point that out.

My major concern is that this number of database transactions will
really eat up system resources if this tracking is done on every click.

Any information you can provide on methods through Interchange or
software that is available would be great.

I also have never done anything with clustering or similar things to
move processing to other machines so any information on that would also
be appreciated.

Thank you.

------
Andrew