Tracking the source of visit of our website

As a company or the owner of a website, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of our visitors. The information could be useful to enhance the website itself, or even to create a targeted advertisement. These information including the location and the source of the user visit. In the other hand, the statistics of each page in our website are also important. For example: how often user visit the particular page, which page is the most visited page, where the user usually navigate from one page to another. Then the question remain: how can we gain these information in a nice, simple and easy way?

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Submitted by Tri Kurniawan Wijaya on Mon, 11/15/2010 - 11:25
2 answers

Using Piwik (open source web analytics)

Piwik is an Open Source alternative to Google Analytics.

  • You'll need access to web server (via shell or FTP) that supports at least PHP 5.1.3 an MySQL 4.1
  • Go to www.piwik.org and download the latest version of piwik (zip-file).
  • Unzip it and upload the files into a folder on your web server, e.g. yourserver.com/piwik
  • In your webbrowser, navigate to the URL you installed Piwik on.
  • Now you are guided through the installation process. Follow the instructions.
  • At the end of the installation process, Piwik will provide you a JavaScript code snippet which you will have to embed in the website you want to analyze. You can paste it into the body of footer-tag.
Submitted by Bernhard Fischer on Thu, 11/25/2010 - 22:13

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Using Google Analytics to track the user visit

Tracking the user visit of our website can be done in a nice, simple, and easy way using Google Analytics.
1. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/
2. You need a Google account to enter. Create one (sign up) if you do not have any Google account yet.
3. Click "Add Website Profile" and provide the url of your website (and the other necessary information, such as: timezone).
4. Choose the appropriate option in "What are you tracking"
5. Copy and paste the code in the box into every page that you would like to track. Paste the code immediately before the closing </head> tag.
6. Click "Save and Finish"

Usually you have to wait for 24 hours to see the report. Once your report appear, you can also create a customize report using the link in the left hand side (after you clicked "View report"). Location, time, source, how long the user visit the page, etc can be observed easily using Google Analytics.

Submitted by Tri Kurniawan Wijaya on Mon, 11/15/2010 - 11:34