Can we make sure they're opening on our site?

Monitoring and logging who is looking at us

[myPH]

We're planning a promotion in which we hope maybe 100 specific, semi-public computers will commit to use our website as their default browser opening page. In return, we'll put an advert for them on our site.

Is there are easy way for us to make sure they do set us as default and maintain us there - for instance putting us back if a user resets the default opener?

We envisage something like monitoring a log of their addresses, and simply being able to check periodically that they are looking at us regularly.

As you can tell, we are still in the amateur stage - but keen to learn.

Tnx for any advice

[myPH]

Re my earlier posting: I've just been searching through the long-ago past tracking and logging threads and I'm starting to realize now that there is no easy answer. Maybe I'll have some answers after a couple of days/weeks' reading. Oh well ...

I should've searched further before posting, but I got waylaid by a few link dead-ends and hi-tech bafflers.

However, if there is an easy all-in answer by way of a package for basic visitor-address logging (given our lack of knowledge of scripts, servers etc) I'd be v.grateful for recommendations? We currently have Webalyzer and it doesn't seem to tell us what we want.

tnx

[cgrantski]

People may not be answering because your question is a tough one.

These computers will be ISPs? that will be showing your page as soon as a user opens their browser? Then you'll be able to see a slew of hits to that page from IPs belonging to that ISP.

I suggest that you ask each of these sites/ISPs to use a unique link to your home page, one that you can track. It can be as simple as www.yoursite.com/index.htm?source=specificISP. That way, you can monitor that number of hits you're getting over time.

I'm wondering if the act of setting a specific page to be the home page of a browser is the same as setting a bookmark. If so, there are ways to track bookmarking behavior (but only for IE 5x and 6x).

Other than setting yourself up as a user on those sites and checking whether the home page gets restored when you reset it to something else, I have no other ideas.

I do think that forcing a particular home page on somebody is nasty, though!

[myPH]

Oops, we certainly don't want to be nasty with this promotion...

The computers default-opening to our website would be those online in the rooms of local hotels, or in the hotel busines centers, i.e. used by hotel guests. The opening page is set by the hotel and the browser has got to open to something so it might as well be us (usually it's the hotel website which we would replace). Most of the hotels we have approached so far like the idea.

We are a general webmagazine about the country which these hotel guests are visiting, so the information is hopefully useful to them - or at least a good read. We have advertising but we're not trying to hard-sell our own company - we just want to generate valid traffic for our advertisers.

simon

[cgrantski]

Ohhhhh okay. That's totally acceptable! My bad for assuming things.

[cgrantski]

And, by the way, there's no trace in the logs when a browser sets your page as its opening page. I did some experiments.

[Slade]

If you dig a little, you should be able to find some windows scripting or hints for running regedit from the command line to place the url of your site back as the default every time the pc is rebooted.

[GaryK]

Have you checked to see if these hotels already have a Security Policy in place to prevent their guests from tampering with the inner-workings of Windows? They should have these policies in place and if done correctly would prevent their guests from doing things like altering the Start Page.

[myPH]

Thank you webmaestros. Oy, there's so much to learn.

But I'll make this particular learning curve my project for this weekend. So if there are more suggestions out there, please post 'em - make my weekend more, well, interesting...

This must be the best forum since, I dunno, maybe the 12 Disciples.

simon

[cgrantski]

How about a simple script that resets the home page whenever the computer is booted?

[ytswy]

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't the query string idea mentioned above work fairly well, although require a little work to set up.

If the home page for each machine was set to www.yourdomain.com/index.html?hotel=blah&machineid=bleh

Where blah and bleh are the name of the hotel, and a unique identifier for the machine respectively, you could track hits by hotel and machine easily.

Admittedly you can't prove a negative - a machine that hasn't recorded a hit may not be in use, rather than been tampered with, but you would know where the hits you are getting are coming from, and maybe you could query any machine that hasn't made a hit in a specified time period.

Obviously it's a bit of work to set up, and if they don't mind installing a script to reset the home page on startup that would be easier.

[cgrantski]

We're talking about 2-1/2 things - 1) knowing if traffic is coming from the various partners, 2) knowing if the default pages in browsers are being replaced by other pages, 2.5) being able to enforce keeping the default pages aimed at his site. I think the parameterized URL is the perfect solution for #1 (well, I brought it up) and we're trying to figure out 2.5 now, skipping over 2.

Have I further confused you? :)