[ic] User tracking

Joshua Lavin joshua at kingdomdesign.com
Thu Oct 21 14:14:24 EDT 2004


On Oct 21, 2004, at 11:22 AM, Jamie Neil wrote:
> Stefan Hornburg wrote:
>> Jamie Neil <jamie at versado.net> wrote:
>>> I've found the usertrack file very useful for both troubleshooting 
>>> and generating accurate ROI stats etc. However when you're serving 
>>> 500K pages per month it quickly grows unmanagable, so I've been 
>>> rotating it once a month and compressing and archiving the old logs.
>>>
>>> This works ok but means that only the current months stats are 
>>> easily available to me for producing reports. What I'd like to do is 
>>> log the same kind of information to an SQL database which will 
>>> (hopefully) be more scalable and faster/easier when generating 
>>> reports.
>>>
>>> Has anyone done this and if so could they give me some tips? I was 
>>> thinking about putting a block of perl in an Autoload, but I'm not 
>>> sure whether this is the best approach.
>> Presumably we can extend Interchange's usertracking easily to log into
>> a SQL database. I'll look into that soon if you like. How do you
>> generate statistics from the usertracking information ? I'm sure that
>> other users will be interested in your experiences.
>
> At the moment I'm doing some analysis by hand (a combination of grep 
> and Excel), and some using the traffic report module from IC 5.0 
> (which seems to be missing/disabled in 5.2). We track all our paid 
> advertising (PPC and banners etc.) by setting mv_pc in the query 
> string so they are treated by IC as "affiliates".
>
> The stats produced by the traffic report are very useful, but could be 
> much better if the data was in a database so more complex queries were 
> possible. Once I get this working I'm looking at extending the traffic 
> report module to take advantage of it and I'd be happy to feedback the 
> results to the group.

We've been using Urchin for traffic reporting (www.urchin.com). Just 
recently I switched the visitor tracking method to use the 
mv_session_id from IC, rather than IP+browser, for better tracking.

Using IC's log tag, I also now have an ELF2 log suitable for processing 
with Urchin's e-commerce module, which can report revenue by day, by 
product, by region, etc.

Urchin can be expensive (US $900), but it's reports are certainly worth 
the price to us.

--
Josh Lavin
Kingdom Design   http://www.kingdomdesign.com/



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