A plea to software developers...

by DavidO
5 replies
For me, and I would guess for many others, a piece of software that could do the following would be priceless:

Analyze my website logs and report in a simple format:

1. Which keywords buyers used (assuming they came through organic search)

2. Which sites or referring pages buyers come from

3. All other relevant buyer behavior

Of course you can get all this information from logs manually but when you have many hundreds of visitors a day it gets pretty confusing. I'd like to access a daily report that lies it all out in an easy to understand report.

If there is already a tool that can do this do let me know!
#developers #plea #software
  • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
    This seems to be pretty close to what you described above: Piwik - Web analytics - Open source
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    • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
      Originally Posted by Istvan Horvath View Post

      This seems to be pretty close to what you described above: Piwik - Web analytics - Open source
      Sounds pretty much what the OP wanted and since it is installed on your server (unlike other stats systems) it will report true and real results.

      Good find there Istvan...

      James
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      • Profile picture of the author DavidO
        Yes, I second (or third) that! Thanks, Istvan... This resource looks very interesting.

        I was afraid someone would simply say "Google Analytics" but those who have tried know that it's neither very clear nor accurate.

        Thanks again.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gene Pimentel
    Istvan, thank you for that link.
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  • Profile picture of the author xiaophil
    While Piwik may certainly be a surprise to those who have yet to google for "analytics" (after all, it's only been around for years) I fail to see how it is relevant to the requirements of the OP.

    I've been running Piwik for a while across all my sites, it uses the same mechanism as GA to track visitors (JavaScript and cookies), with the same pitfalls, and provides a small subset of the features.

    Am I missing something, or if there is some confusion as to it's capabilities?

    Originally Posted by DavidO View Post

    1. Which keywords buyers used (assuming they came through organic search)

    2. Which sites or referring pages buyers come from

    3. All other relevant buyer behavior
    Are we perhaps confusing buyers with visitors, because AFAIK that's all Piwik (attempts to) track out of the box?

    A script which associates buyers with the referring page and keyword would be great, especially for sales which occur off-site (e.g. Clickbank).

    If anyone knows of such a beastie please do tell. It's on my long list of scripts to be outsourced - seems trivial at first, but I think there's perhaps a bit of hidden complexity there.

    Of course you can get all this information from logs...
    Could you share how you filter buyers from logs? My (webserver) logs don't show much more than page requests - maybe OK for on-site thank-you page indicating a sale but how about off-site?
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