Dreamweaver Ajax Beta - Details :: Stats for DW Ajax sites
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One last thing, I won't have time to respond here, but just wanted to post this as a reminder to perhaps discuss and keep in mind (at least for a tutorial or so). Posted this to the Team InterAKT forum a couple of days ago.
Any ideas on tracking users of Ajax panels? I was thinking about including some server side code in each of the panel pages, so that I could account for each click with JS enabled, but that would multiply the page views with JS off or Google visiting the site, since all panels would be loaded at once. Naturally, I wouldn't want to trust a JS only solution and I really don't fancy a special tracking solution just for this type of site scenario... I would be afraid that the stats results between a tool like Google Analytics (Just one call to the Urchin code in the Master Page) and Webalizer (analyzing every call to a state page from the server logs) would differ a lot (more than they do anyway).
I guess that would be important to all users who have to create reliable stats.
Bernd
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Hi,
I have given the statistics thing another thought, but it seems really hard to have a generalized statistics solution for this new type of website. When using a server-side stats module, you probably would include it in the main content panel if there is one. Or one would have to build a specific tracking app that stores page views for the master page and the panel/include pages and then calculate the real number of clicks by analyzing the difference and intersections of master page and panel request (taking the different scenarios into account: Regular Ajax Request, direct call of the master page, jump to a specific panel set via a link, update of a panel using layout changers).
Before I start working on such a solution I'd love to hear from the people here how you would approach this. Any ideas?
Bernd
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It would seem to me that if ea... View more
It would seem to me that if each panel (page) was tracked, it would suffice to let the owner know how many times that particular content was viewed... and the master page would serve as the amount of times the overall was hit.... either way... if I open the page to a default panel....then click on the ABOUT US panel.... it will count once for the master page, once for the default panel, and once for the about us panel.....which seems pretty straightforward... or am I missing it completely?
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Hi Neil,
well the standard se... View more
Hi Neil,
well the standard server log analyzers such as Webalizer would count each call of a page as a page view. Sp when you have a master page with 3 panels, I would guess we would end up with four page views (one for the master page, and three for each panel) although the page was only viewed once by one user. So the effect would be a lot more page views when first viewing the page, so it would be hard to find out the number of pages per visit. Also, as compared to regular pages with includes, we would get more page views, which would blur the picture. It's pretty hard to have precise comparisons to previous statistics. See what I mean? It gets even harder if you use a PHP or even JS based stats system. If you include the PHP counter code in each panel page, when a user with JS turned off or a search engine indexes a site, it would count 4 page views for every page view. If you include a JS counter only in the head of the master page, you wouldn't get any records of page views for the panels. Again, totally messed up stats.
My idea is to use a hidden stats panel that is reloaded using Layout Changers on every panel. The logging script would have to log what link was clicked or the GET variables of the page, but that requires building a whole new stats system, because all solutions out there log the script name of the file that was loaded, so if we used this system, we would end up with stats only on this hidden panel file.
So I'm really lost here on how we can update sites to use Interakt's AJAX implementation and continue using our standard stats tools...
Any thoughts on this, Interakt?
Bernd
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As a general thought, in revei... View more
As a general thought, in reveiwing hte couple of posts to this thread, it seems to me there exists some disagreement over what to track, even before we get to the issue of how to do it. Do we want to track hits on each panel? Are we just interested in who loads the basic page? Both? ARe we concerned about panel changes only? Neil and Bernd almost appear to be talking about two different issues, although I don't think they mean to.
Old days, count the page load, count the page refresh. Now we are talking about counting the page load, then counting each panel refresh, without counting the default panel load, since that is part of the page load? Except this becomes complex, at least to my simple mind.
So, before we move on to how to count, we really need a specific agreement on what we are counting, and how many times.
Jim A
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To my even simpler mind... isn... View more
To my even simpler mind... isnt each panel actually a page...and therefore wont it get counted?
If I have an ad on a panel caled ad_panel....and its page is adpanel.php then I want to know how many times sdpanel.php got loaded....right?
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Hi Neil,
Yes, I agree that it... View more
Hi Neil,
Yes, I agree that it appears each panel is a page, at least the way InterAKT appoaches it. But, Bernd's point, if I understand it correctly, is that this means when the original page loads, instead of a count of 1 we have a count of 4/5/6, depending upon the nubmer of pages. Then, when a panel changes, we get a count on just that panel.
My question is, is this what we really want. if I had a "standard" page, dynamic or not, the count would be one for the page. If we updated a section, the postback of the entire page moves the count to 2.
If each panel is a count, then assuming our original page has four panels, we get an initial count of 5, one for each panel plus the main page count. Then we update one panel and the count on that "page" is update, so now we are at 6.
Again, maybe if we understand what is going on this is all ok, but is it what we want? If we had a site with even three pages. ONe page had three panels, another four, another four. How do we track the real count? Or, maybe my question really is, how do we define the real count?
You with me? Do we just worry about the total numbers? Do we just track the panels and not worry about which "page" the client is viewing? etc.
Jim A
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If all you are looking at is t... View more
If all you are looking at is total "hits" for your site, then yes...it gets tricky, but if each panel is a page, and you track page clicks, then you just track the number of hits per page (panel) and thats it...when a page with 4 panels loads...each panel has 1 hit.
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Hi guys,
I think this is tu... View more
Hi guys,
I think this is turning more into an issue of how to build relevant statistics for an AJAX Site, rather than something specific related to MX AJAX Toolbox. Yahoo and Google both have public sites based on AJAX and it would be interesting to know how they track visits (if they do! - and I assume they are).
I think measuring the right thing depends on what you want to achieve:
- if you're a content editor, you would be more interested in which individual panel gets loaded more than others and how you could optimize the ones that receive less visits. So you would be tracking individual panel visits/requests.
- if you're a "web master" or site owner, you would be more interested in the total number of visits your sites receives. Defining what a visit means can be very tricky, indeed, but my guess is you should count all page loads (even if just a panel changes from one load to another).
Just my two cents.
Regards,
Marius
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By the way, I just came across... View more
By the way, I just came across some interesting resources:
http://ajax.phpmagazine.net/2006/03/tactics_and_strategies_to_trac.html
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/success-traffic-analysis
;)
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