cfx211 - 4:43 pm on Dec 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

First off nice to see a decent in depth discussion happening in Tracking and Logging. We need more of them in here.

Receptional:

1. We also run an old version of Accrue that does our standard canned traffic reports. We still need these for our sponsors and to get a general idea of how well our content sections are doing.

We have plenty of standard reports floatng around, but for us its more a matter of "does everything look ok, did we sell what we thought we were going to sell? If yes, great tell us something we don't know now. If no, then find the problem."

For me I always need to be uncovering the new stuff, and just making sure the old stuff looks right so I am less interested in standard reports. They are still very important, just don't excite me that much.

My managers expect accuracy in $$$, not in traffic. They also expect me to help bring in $$$.

2. What's important for your site, isn't quite so important for mine. You cannot do anything functionally useful on our site if you do not accept cookies. You can read content, but that's it.

That's why I am such a fan of cookie based tracking. We still try to issue a cookie to every request that does not have them, that means bots get a ton of cookies that I need to filter out by UA or IP.

It's not that I have given up trying to be 100% accurate, its just that I think it is nearly impossible for my site and the web at large. I can tell you where 99.9% of our revenue comes from, and if the remaining 0.1% comes from people disabling cookies, well my time is much better spent trying to get more out of everyone else than knowing a for sure count of a fringe case.

Your site my be an entirely different can of worms where not knowing the X% of cookieless, proxied, stray cats can make or break you.

Why is it so critical for you to be 99.9% accurate with your traffic?

That's why I say DIY. Only you can know what is critical for your business. It sucks to shell out money for a product and find it can't meet the one or two critical issues you have.

Mipapage: I'll throw up my method for pathing using Oracle in another post. Maybe it will give you some ideas.