A very silent Sunday...

[alex]

I discovered this just before Christmas and it can be quite addictive. Whenever someone goes to my shop basket I get all excited, but when they don't buy I get all agitated. Tonight someone came back 7 times before buying, it can be quite good to see buyer behaviour in a way the analytics reports don't show.

It's quite nice to see real time what keywords people are using too, but it's a shame you can't block your own IP address.

 

[Edwin]

I reset my internal tracker exactly 5 minutes ago.

Since then, Google Analytics Realtime has shown 0 visits.

My internal tracker on the other hand has shown 1 "human-looking visit"* to each of the following names:
sulfuricacid.co.uk
popularculture.co.uk
fashionmarketing.co.uk
palletrecycling.co.uk
90sfashion.co.uk
camerafilters.co.uk
sixtyfour.co.uk
tendonitis.co.uk
luxurywear.co.uk

*based on what the user agent shows up as.

 

[davedevelopment]

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x4.90)

I find it really hard to believe any human could still put up with IE6 on Win98

 

[Edwin]

I find it really hard to believe any human could still put up with IE6 on Win98

Actually I did a bit of Googling and that seems to be a common spambot user agent (though it can also be legit) so I'm no longer logging visits that match it (just like I don't log visits from Bing, Google and other spiders I can identify).

 

[Edwin]

Here's another puzzle: dichroicglass.co.uk had 4 visits in the past hour alone from 4 different seemingly "real" user agents.

On the one hand that's nice to see, on the other hand that's way out of proportion to the suggested exacts (or indeed to the number of visits clocked up by any of our other names during that same 1-hour window)

 

[rob]

Its worth setting up your own logging code, I have a simple system that creates a DB log file for parked domains.

That ties in with a contact form, so one click from the email you can see the path the user used to get to the site, plus other visits from that IP over time.

You need to filter out major spiders though or you get it filled with *alot* of cruft.

The parking is also redirected by a third party site that logs stats , plus has GA and awstats, so you can get alot of data / views on how worthy that data is.

 

[Edwin]

You need to filter out major spiders though or you get it filled with *alot* of cruft.

Yep! I'm filtering 24 nuisance bots at the .htaccess level (not even letting them see the page in the first place) and other "nice" bots like Google and Bing's crawlers can see it but don't get logged in my internal log file.

 

[Admin]

I discovered this just before Christmas and it can be quite addictive. Whenever someone goes to my shop basket I get all excited, but when they don't buy I get all agitated. Tonight someone came back 7 times before buying, it can be quite good to see buyer behaviour in a way the analytics reports don't show.

It's quite nice to see real time what keywords people are using too, but it's a shame you can't block your own IP address.

If you are using Wordpress there are stats tools that ignore your hits as long as you login as Admin or another registered user.

 

[rob]

Speaking of bots, we're working on a few things for our affiliate sites and one thing i didn't realise is how prevalent scraping was. It's a bit demoralising to think that all the hours, days and weeks spent writing unique content for sites can be taken within seconds.

Does anyone try and stop scraping?

Its hard, I limit 'feed' to show just 1 post with summary in my wordpress installs otherwise you end up with 'spun' or straight copies all around the web.