[thelist] Web Page Statistics

Luther, Ron Ron.Luther at hp.com
Tue Jan 23 10:42:48 CST 2007


Adam Audette responded to:

>>But who visited what page, this is micro-marketing but for what 
>>purpose? Interesting, and I'm eager to hear the exact reason for 
>>this. Is this tracking common on paid site stat services?

With:

>It would be worthwhile to know what searches brought them to 
>the page, from what country or region/city, and what browser 
>they used. ... One use of this kind of data is for geotargeted 
>advertising.


Hi Adam,

I think there is another answer.

I think there is another need for 'individual' statistics 
when doing what I guess could be called "path analysis".  

It's nice to know that 50% of your visitors saw Page 1 
and 65% saw Page 2 ... But it can be a lot more interesting 
to know that 35% of your visitors followed path "Page 1 -> 
Page 5 -> Page 17" while 62% of your visitors followed path 
"Page 1 -> Page 8 -> Page 32". [1]

So it might not be micro-demographic-targeting.  It might 
just be a need to maintain state in order to do path 
analysis of the site.  Now the paths themselves may 
correlate with different demographics ... Etc.


HTH,
RonL.

[1] Referrer information can give you a fair amount of 
that; But I don't think it does a good job covering 
recursive paths like "Page 1 -> Page 5 -> Page 1 -> 
Page 7 -> Page 5 -> Page 39".  To properly capture 
that kind of path I think you really need to roll 
your own state, log, and analysis app.



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