Tracking return visitors?

[CernyM]

I'd like to be able to break down my website visitors into categories something like the following:

Referrals Sources (e.g. search engines)
New visitors
Return visitors

I'm trying to figure out how many times people return to the site before buying something. There must be packages designed to give this information...

[cfx211]

I have not seen any affordable package do this, but you can build this sort of tracking yourself.

If you can code or have access to someone who can code and you issue a session cookie and a user cookie, then set up two tables in your site.

One for user cookies and one for session cookies. Every time your site issues one of these cookies, it would insert a row into the appropriate table. The session table should have a link to the user cookie table. Then you can run a query where you join the user cookie table to the session cookie table and count the number of session cookies for each user cookie. This will give you the number of visits per person to your site.

The other thing of course is that you need to store the session cookie value when an order/significant event happens.

In house tracking systems are worth the effort.

[Receptional]

Cookie based tracking systems do this very well.

[CernyM]

I whipped up my own little return visitor tracker using PHP, MySQL, and cookies.

I can also tie it to my purchases database and find out different buying patterns between first time visitors and repeat visitors.

Its ugly as sin, but its getting the job done for now.

I'd REALLY like to find something like LivePerson's real-time user monitor, which allows me to watch people come into the site and follow the pages that they hit, while they are hitting them.

This has been EXTREMELY valuable to me in terms of getting a sense of how users "feel" my site. Unfortunately, this functionality of LivePerson is really an afterthought and is missing a lot of the things I'd like it to have. LivePerson's pricepoint is also too high for just this feature - since I don't want/need the live chat stuff.

--Mike