Re: Tracking.

[Ryan Hertz <rhertz@gyb.baits.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Ryan Hertz <rhertz@gyb.baits.com>     ******

At 10:30 AM 4/9/99 , F.M. Taylor wrote:
>******    message to minivend-users from "F.M. Taylor"
<root@syrinx.jeffnet.org>     ******
>
>I have minivend setup and it is working fine (www.bloomingbulb.com)
>However, I received this request from the people I developed the site for,
>and as far as I can tell there is no way to do it.  Not good.  Can you
>help??

	There's always a way to do it... the question is can your client afford
your time spent on it?  :-)

>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>I would like to have the number of hits per page, Total unique visitors
>by day, week, hour and month.  What countries they're coming from,
>which keywords they're using for the search engines, which search
>engines they're coming from.  Is this something you can do?

	For hits per page you could add 1 to a file called [item-code].count or
such.  Unique visitors cannot be tracked accurately without having the
customers log-in every time they visit.  You could potentially count unique
hosts.  Currently, we have a 'doorway' page before the store that is in
normal HTML space, that aids in counting visitors.  Counting keywords used
from a search engine?  If your webserver is set up in the correct fashion
you could track the environment variable HTTP_REFERER (I think that's what
it is).  I would certainly recommend trying to improve your search engine
standings rather than tracking how people find you.

>[the boss] is concerned that since we can't see the tracking that the site
>isn't working right.

	Well, if it starts bringing in $$ then maybe he'll think it works!

>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>My normal httpd log report generator (MKStats) only shows the stats for
>/cgi-bin/ hits, which is understandable, since that is the only page the
>httpd (apache) actually sees/logs.

	My Apache logs /cgi-bin/(my catalog name)/(item requested or page loaded).
 Perhaps you should look into another logging program.  If you're using
Unix try cat (your)-access_log | grep /cgi-bin/ and see if you don't get
the same.

>
>I grabbed the method for a hit counter from the mailing list archives, but
>am clueless on how to do the rest of what they want.
>
>TIA


Ryan Hertz                                              tel  520-645-3812
Webmaster                                               tel  800-645-BAIT
Advertising Director                                    fax  520-645-2588
Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits, Inc.            http://www.yamamoto.baits.com
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