Looking for tracking tools when cookie disabled

[mikeinjersey]

Seems like every year that goes by, less and less are using cookies. Because of this Google analytics is only tracking like 20% of my visitors at best.

Looking for popular solutions / tracking that still track when cookies are disabled, and possibly when JavaScript is disabled as well. But primarily when cookies = disabled.

Thanks

[tangor]

Your best "tracking" of all is raw server logs.

[keyplyr]

@mikeinjersey - Agree, forget cookie based tracking as well as JS tracking. They miss to much.

I got rid of GA years ago. It slowed page loads significantly for many visitors and it missed too much info.

I download the raw log to my local machine and run it through a custom version of analog [download.cnet.com] as well as some targetted grepping.

[tangor]

I dump mine into an ACCESS database and run custom queries and reporting. Side benefit is having more than 15 years worth of data in one location with side benefit of having separate databases for each site which CAN be combined for reporting purposes to gain even more understanding over a wider chunk of data.

Any database will do the job, this is just what I had on hand at the time and haven't had a need to update it.

[mikeinjersey]

It's funny the 'disinformation' campaign out there to make this number seem a lot lower than it actually is. (more fake news?) I tried looking up articles just now of the estimated amount of people that have cookies disabled and they try to make it seem like it's only between 2% and 10% ...if only the truth was out there.

Thanks for the suggestions. I might try the server log analyzer route. But any guidance on coding we can put on our sites? I'm trying to track just certain pages / folders. Access logs are notorious for counting a lot of unneeded stats when just trying to look for SEO type performance data.

[tangor]

Depending on what you have, perl, php, whatever, on page load drop a data unit into a file on your own server. Same as a log file, just for the pages that have that script.

[keyplyr]

I'm trying to track just certain pages / folders. Access logs are notorious for counting a lot of unneeded stats when just trying to look for SEO type performance data.

Access logs don't *track* anything. The log is just that, a log, a record of who accessed what on your server when.

You pull the info you want using your favorite tool. Most of these tools rely upon code on all your pages using cookies/javascript. As you found out, this method misses too much.

Best to not use any code on your pages at all. Just download the raw log and get your info from that.

Raw logs give you the complete record without putting bloated code on your pages, but you need to either develop the skills necessary to pull the desired info from the log or get software that will do it for you.

There are many sotware programs that install on your machine to process your access log and output analytic reports.

I suggested analog because it's free & highly customizeable but there are many others, some free & and some priced.

[tangor]

If not clear, I am speaking of server side (include exec) scripts which will not have any real impact on page loading and can be confined to only the page(s) that call the include.

It is one line on any page, so no bloat involved.

HOWEVER it is easier to just use the raw log and learn how to read them and, more importantly, how to extract the data desired. Also learning what to exclude from any reporting/analysis.

grep (linix) or find (windows) can accomplish many wondrous things with log files.

[keyplyr]

On Windows I use PowerGrep [powergrep.com] Very easy, lots of features but not free :(

[mikeinjersey]

grep I'm fond of on Linux. I usually only used this in the past for monitoring security logs.

Could I get a command or 2 for using this with 'raw logs' ...for the type of stats we're looking for ?

[keyplyr]

@mikeinjersey - noone is going to know exactly "the type of stats we're looking for" so you're going to have to learn by doing. That's how we all learn.

Grep is a command line utility originally written for use with the Unix operating system. The default behaviour of grep takes a regular expression (RegEx) on the command line, reads standard input or a list of files, and outputs the lines containing matches for the regular expression.

If you want to grep from your access logs, first you should be familiar with RegEx: [regular-expressions.info...] and here's some popular command examples [thegeekstuff.com...]