[Pro] Who Visited?

Freeway
1

New to Freeway and site building. How does one add code to track who actually visited (by URL # or name). That is, I do not simply want to track analytics of page hits, I want to know who visited.

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2

Google Analytics produces some amazing stats…including geographic locations of visitors.

PRO has an action to help you install it. Go to Page->Page Actions->Google Analytics.

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3

Rich, thanks. I’ve already incorporated the Google Analytic action (and am working on customizing my GA reports).

I’m looking for a way to identify exactly who visited (more specifically, from what URL).

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4

I’m looking for a way to identify exactly who visited (more specifically, from what URL).

Most hosting providers offer site/visit analysing software that will give you this sort of info - have a look in your CPanel if you have one.

There is usually a section called Referrers that should list referring Search Engines and Referring Sites.

David

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5

But it’s important to realize that the only way to really know who’s
visiting you is to ask them. You can get a limited amount of
information about a visitor anonymously – without asking directly –
but really you’re limited to the following:

  • Browser, platform, other technical hooey
  • IP Address (probably worthless information, you’ll get the proxy
    server their ISP uses and little else)
  • URI requested, and whether it was successful or not
  • Time of request (but really no good way to tell what time zone the
    request came from, so again, fairly meaningless)

There are services that will attempt to untwist this puzzle for you,
there are IP to geolocation lookup services that can help you figure
out the general location of your visitor in the world. But for
example, every single AOL subscriber in the world appears to live in
Hernedon, VA, USA. I’ve been there – it’s not that large, really.

Set up a survey and ask people what you want to know. Let them vote
and see the answers if they give up some personal information. Offer
something of value for download if they answer three questions (white
papers or research reports are good for this). Select 100 visitors at
random to get a real physical goodie by mail in exchange for more
information. There’s lots of ways to do this, but you have to ask the
question. You cannot silently dig it out of the browser – they’ve all
been “hardened” against this sort of information leakage since NSCA
Mosaic version 1.1 or so (1994?).

Walter

On Jan 19, 2010, at 1:59 PM, DeltaDave wrote:

I’m looking for a way to identify exactly who visited (more
specifically, from what URL).

Most hosting providers offer site/visit analysing software that will
give you this sort of info - have a look in your CPanel if you have
one.

There is usually a section called Referrers that should list
referring Search Engines and Referring Sites.

David

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