tracking referal urls

livestats

[rayjam]

Hi Guys

I have a new client who uses an online reporting system called livestats. Trouble is, although I am refering traffic to the index page of his url, Livestats is only recording one referal per day from my redirect page! I have access to his online reports. My logs on webtrends show approx 100 uniques per day and rising. I get the feeling that the click thrus are not being analysed out when the index page is the entry point but I'm only guessing. Has anyone else come across this problem.

Thanks

[Brett_Tabke]

For the price of that thing, I'd think tech support would make a house call to answer any questions.

[mark_roach]

Sorry I can't help you with your problem, yet another of the many stats packages I have never used. There are some online manuals and a FAQ section on the livestats website which may be of help.

[deepmetrix.com...]

[pmac]

I wish I could be of help to you rayjam, as I do use the program, but I have not seen this problem before.

[Shane]

Have you tried looking at the raw log files to determine if the information is being recorded correctly?

You could do a test and make a couple of referrals at from a specific IP and a known time and later that day check to see if the log files contain the correct information.

Also, if you have access to the log files could you down load a free package and run it to see if you have the same issue?

</Green> :) </NoColor>

Good Luck,
Shane

[unknownsoldier]

A client used to use Livestats last year and I found the referrer information to be pretty dubious at the least. Especially the search engine details.

If I remember correctly you can extend how many results are displayed e.g:

The top 10, top 50, top 100 and top 250 referrers.

I would try another stats package to cross reference results once or twice until you find a stats package you are happy with.

[rayjam]

Thanks Guys

I have suggested to the client that he either gets livestats to sort it or he creates a unique page on his site as a dedicated entry point for the traffic I send, I further suggested that a simple third party counter be placed thereon, plus a redirect to the index page (if needed) This seems a bit clunky to me, but I can't think of a better way. Does anyone know of a superior approach to this?
Thanks

Rayjam

[click watcher]

live stats has a feature where you can "watch" a url (eg count hits) this would save having a thid party counter, i've found it to be reasonably accurate.so this would work if he had a dedicated page to recieve your traffic.

an alternative would be if you used a trusted package to count click throughs from your site with an area where he could log on and see his click throus in real time, some are available free at hotscripts.com

in general livestats gives a good overview but is lacking in depth, it also truncates referal url strings etc etc
my host supplies it as part of the package but once i got into doing seo on my sites i had to download the raw log files and analayse them locally with other applications in order to get any real benefit.

[Receptional]

We use LiveStats in preference to webtrends and find it quite useful - The question is whether you have versiuon 5 or 6? version 6 we tried and it frankly crashed our server, but we have never found this problem in version 5.

One large problem with Livestats is that after 12 months of keeping logs, it gets a bit confused about its dates. May be worth "resetting" the log path in the admin set up screen.

[TallTroll]

One or two of my sites are using LiveStats 5.03 for tracking, and I hate it. You can see whats been looked at, or who's been to see you, but you can't cross-reference the two (so no user-path tracking :(). LS also has problems with recognising certain SEs. I found a support page somewhere that said that LS not recognising Google was a known bug

I am VERY frustrated with the cutoff in the Referring URLs report. It loses any info after the ?, ie the keywords used. It will record some info in a separate Keywords report, but that facility only seems to be available for low-traffic engines.

I am seeing pass-overs from doorway pages fine though

>> recording one referal per day from my redirect page!

surfer>>external domain>>client domain. Is this what you mean, rayjam?

[Halfloaf]

I would agree with click_watcher when he says to set up a watch on your ip.
The basic ref results on livestats are very poor.
To set up the watch on version 5.02 go to the virtual admin section and click watches>create new watch>New IP Watch and then fill in the relevant details.

[stephen]

Has anyone used the tracking system Web Position Gold sells.... I have not, but am starting to get serious about wondering where do the people come from who buy from us. If a goto key word, or a google search etc.... Sounds like whatever anyone uses, it is going to be a bit of elbow grease to make it work right, Stephen.