tracking page route of conversions

[musicales]

I would like to be able to look at the route through the site of people who end up on the checkout page. My server has webtrends but that doesn't offer that kind of detail. Anyone got any suggestions what I could try?

[ngsmith]

Give each visitor a unique visitor cookie and log that into your log files. I even believe there is an Apache module to do that ... let me look ... yes, Google "Apache module usertrack".

Sorry if you're not using Apache - the principles remain the same, but the implementation might be more complex.

Some (particularly up tight :-) users don't like cookies, but some stats are better than no stats.

Failing that I've had good success with a Python script I wrote that finds new sessions and then follows the referrer paths to build a complete picture of paths that people followed. Combine that with free software (graphviz and dot) and you can "roll your own" analysis tools. Significantly cheaper and more flexible than anything commercial I've ever come across.

Neil.

[claus]

There's software that will do that for you. Mostly it only requires you to put a little piece of code on (your pages, and modify it slightly on) your sales confirmation page.

AdWords: [adwords.google.com...]
Overture: [content.overture.com...]

- and there's quite a few more that are not related to (those two) ad systems.

I should add that the "click path analysis" (page route) is not supported in systems where you only place a code snippet on the confirmation page. To enable this you should use a system that allows you to put code on all pages.

[cgrantski]

Doesn't your version of WebTrends have reverse path analysis? Where you just specify the checkout page and get a report on all the steps that led to that page? Check before you look for something else.

[digitalv]

iWebTrack also does what you're looking for if you're into the hosted web stats thing. You can specify a "completed order url" (a page that is only seen by visitors who have bought something from your site) and then you can see what navigational path they took, products they looked at, keywords, referring document, etc.