Tracking visitors to our site

...using my own code

[giggle]

Hi

We currently track visitors to our site via some code that I wrote (in ASP) that picks up ServerVariables ("HTTP_REFERER", "QUERY_STRING", "URL" as well as others to get IP Address, browser).

In general the software appears to work fine allowing us to attach the search phrase used by the customer directly to the product enquired on or purchased.

The problem is that throughout the day there are dozens of "direct" (i.e. no search string from any engine) hits to our site (way to many - I don't think that we're that popular).

Do you think that the code is somehow losing the seach string, am I missing some important ServerVariable, is the information not being passed to our site or is there a better way to collect the information?

I'd really appreciate any feed back as my head is almost scratched raw.

Thanks

Mick

[phranque]

what are the user agent and referer values telling you in these cases?

[copland]

They're using web anonimyzer software...

Probably been fooled into buying that "you're in trouble, it's a fact" software when they're trawling the net for porn!

[giggle]

Thanks phranque and copland

From what I can make out the "HTTP_REFERER" is blank and I don't use the "USER_AGENT" (I'll take a look at that one next).

You could be right copland...people hiding their information probably accounts for some of the blanks.

I was wondering...if I can't collect the information using ServerVariables can some of the paid software solutions get the, for example, search string using a different method?

Cheers

Mick

[cgrantski]

There are lots of reasons for the referrer being blank even if the traffic comes from search engines. I don't know how widespread anonymizers are - I would guess less than 1% of the population. That's just a guess. And I suppose it also depends on your definition of "population."

I have been marking PPC traffic from search engines for three years now, and one of the reports I run has to do with whether the referrer field is blank. It's a surprisingly big percentage, between 10 and 20 percent. I'm pretty sure it has to do with some of the affiliate search engines - not the main ones like Google and Yahoo - opening links in a new browser window. Opening in a new window causes an empty referrer field for anyone using IE.

Because of this, you might want to check whether the missing referrers belong mostly to IE browsers, and that the percentage is a lot lower for Safari and Firefox.

[giggle]

Interesting stuff cgrantski.

I ran our report over the past week checking for blank referral strings and each day resulted in around 20% blank referrals.

Is the "HTTP_REFERER" the only method of capturing the referral string or do the companies who sell tracking software have a more sophisticated way of doing it?

Thanks

Mick