Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Now comes today.
I have my site set up so that anyone that completes a purchase is directed to a Thank You page. I had 10 purchases made on the 22nd, yet only 3 hits on my Thank You page are logged.
One of those 10 purchases has an odd quirk, and since I've been busy on the site I assumed I might have done something to cause the quirk. Anxiously I awaited the witching hour so I could d/l the previous days logs and research the glitch. To my amazement, the IP address (recorded by my cart at the time of purchase) never once appears in the log. And lo, then I discover only 3 purchases hit my Thank You page, not the 10 that I can verify.
A call to the host tech support (shudder) brings no relief, except when I finally hang up the phone and calm down again :-)
What on earth *might* be preventing some events at my site from being logged at the server? I've been living with the notion that nothing gets by a server log.
That said, I confess I can't see how seven out of ten thank you page loads, presumably all from different people, could all get lost. Were the purchases all from the same person? Or is there something very similar about the buyers - like they are all on AOL or all in a very tight geographical area that might have a cached version of your thank you page somewhere?
These are 10 different orders from 10 different people.
I can venture a guess as to whether they are AOL users by the email address... it's a guess, somewhat of an educated guess, but a guess. 6 of them *might* be AOL users. I don't have any actual AOL addresses in this batch.
Geographically, they are from one end of the country (US) to the other. 2 from CA, 2 from NY, the rest from ME to AZ.
I thought cached pages would still show up with a 304 Status code. If it *is* a cached page problem then isn't there a solution to that? Seems like I've read where I can force a page to load every time it's hit. That might be an option to explore for the Thank You page at least.
If my Thank You page isn't being logged that opens a whole new can of worms... I created that page specifically to track AdWords conversions.
You might want to mark your "Thank You" page as "no-cache" and/or "must-revalidate" and set a very short expires time if seeing these page requests is important to your traffic analysis method. Otherwise, you leave it up to the client and intervening network caches to determine whether to check your site for a "newer" version. If they don't check, you'll see no log entry.
<FilesMatch "^thank_you.html$">
ExpiresDefault A1
Header unset Cache-Control:
Header append Cache-Control: "no-cache, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>
I don't think the version of apache of my host's server is up to snuff on this one. I got nothing but errors and and no web site. I did some research, tried a few variations, still nada. Guess I outta check the version I'm running...
I created that page specifically to track AdWords conversions
The Adwords conversion tool doesn't need to worry about caching I think - am I right that it is a javascript on the conversion page? This runs on "clientside" i.e. on the user's browser rather than "serverside" as in client logs, so should track every time the page loads, regardless of where the page is loaded from.
No-cache- I think you might also be able to get around this by making your thankyou page an ASP or other dynamic page format (I am not techie - someone will say how maybe) and have the .asp code call up some other file on your website in an "uncachable" manner. Infact - if someone can tell me if this is easy, I'd be very interested.
It wouldn't be a problem at all to mod-rewrite my thank you page to a php file and record a hit in a database. In fact probably not a bad idea - will give me some experience with MySQL and php.
Dynamically inserting a timestamp is just beyond my grasp, but I know where to look. I just checked and I'm using Apache 1.3, so I don't know why <FilesMatch> didn't work... obviously an operator error.
<add>Just checked my logs for yesterday, and recorded 3 log entries on my thank you page with 5 purchases in the bank.
</add>
On my cart Receipt Page, the customer had to actually click a button to Continue before my Thank You page gets loaded. So, my Google stats *are* off, the logs *are* off...
Off, in this case, is based on what I expected vs what actually occurred. I guess it would be just as easy to say *I'm off*.
BTW, I did modify my Thank You page to make a database entry every time it was displayed. Once those numbers started coming up short I backtracked thru the checkout process and located the problem.
