How to track my website members use of the website?

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GamerOC

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Ultimate Geek

#142996 31-Mar-2014 12:23

Hi Geekzone and thank you for reading this post.

Firstly yes i have searched google for days and still havent been able to find something that may be able to do what I would like to do with my project.

Secondly Im still searching the web for answers and hopefully some ideas or recommendations from Geekzone members will be highly appretiated and could bring light to my challenge.

I have created a website that its protected with login and password membership.

the website is a academic online database of research resouces like articles.

I would like to find a way to track what members login into sie and how often they use the site. "The site has 60 members" ( Im currently trying to figure out google analytics but its quite confusing).

the purpose of this tracking is to find out if the project is worth investing resources on or if its a waste of funds.

Im not interested on tracking what pages they see i just want to know who logins and how often in a month period for example.

Is this possible and what technology would you recommend me to use, please accept my apology for such a long post.

I thank you all in advance,

cheers,

Andrew

freitasm

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#1016207 31-Mar-2014 20:38

Using Google Analytics you can create Custom Variables and store anything in those. You have up to five Custom Variables but providing they are used in different context you can store an unlimited amount of information.

For example that how I track number of IPv4 vs IPv6 connections, Forums readership, Number of pages served to logged in/non logged in readers, etc. This is what you see for example (with more information, I cut anything with numbers, and you can add/remove columns):

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1016366 1-Apr-2014 09:27

thank you so much freitasm,

that is very interesting and will pursuit getting that setup for my web database site.

Kind regards,

Andrew

TwoSeven

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#1016379 1-Apr-2014 09:42

If you don't want google having access to all your statistical data - the other way is simply to modify your application. Just create a database table called something like analytics with the appropriate data fields you want to capture. Create yourself a "singleton" class that contains appropriate "logging" methods (these simply write data to your db table).

Basically what happens is when an event (request) occurs you log it by calling the appropriate logging method. So methods like LoggingIn, LoggedIn might track attempts at logging in versus successful logins - you might track username, datetime, IP address etc. You may have logging methods for page loads (what pages they navigated to) or even what data was selected, what search terms used etc.

One benefit apart from being able to categorise and mine your own data, is that your web application is not dependant on the availability of an external entity.

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freitasm

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#1016386 1-Apr-2014 09:45

I was going to suggest that but then you get into other space: scaling (it may be that the table to store this data grows more than anything else in the system, database management, performance tuning, etc). Unless the OP wants to know usage by individual user, then an aggregate gives a lot of information.

I could easily track this information on Geekzone itself, but when you're serving millions of pages a month, adding database writes, with associated log flushes, backup space, locking, etc can quickly get you into a nightmare of performance.

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1016393 1-Apr-2014 09:59

I just found this guide that seems quite good

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/user-id?hl=en

TwoSeven

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#1016524 1-Apr-2014 12:48

freitasm: I was going to suggest that but then you get into other space: scaling (it may be that the table to store this data grows more than anything else in the system, database management, performance tuning, etc). Unless the OP wants to know usage by individual user, then an aggregate gives a lot of information.

I could easily track this information on Geekzone itself, but when you're serving millions of pages a month, adding database writes, with associated log flushes, backup space, locking, etc can quickly get you into a nightmare of performance.

I was thinking about the performance side of things itself, however, the statistics writes would normally be async with no reply (unidirectional) and therefore really can work on a non-blocking background thread (if performance was an issue), there are other techniques such as local server queuing (such as batching up requests to local disk and doing a single periodic write) and server partitioning (so these writes go to a dedicated statistics server/cluster) and/or could be pushed into a data warehouse to become read optimised.

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