Can statcounter free me from the horrible Andale counter?

[jhill]

I have a web site and a statcounter project to go with it and naturally it's great. Transparent, fast and acurate. I also sell on ebay and I really wish I could put statcounter into my listings. However, I can see that it needs a different kind of project for this. I just want reasonably accurate tracking of people looking at my listings, without a visible advert in the middle of my descriptions and without having to insert something unique into each listing.

[webado]

Ebay does not allow counters like Statcounter. Probably they disallow javascript.

You can try to use the html version of Statcounter and see if that works, but then you'd not have a lot of information. There will be no url information (neither referrer, nor current page), no screen resolution, no page titles.

[jhill]

Good point. Andale etc uses html script; the limitations would be acceptable because all Andale does is tell you how many people looked at the page. Just getting nationality data would be a big bonus.

The trouble with Andale is that you have to go to their website and select the listing and say 'add counter' every time you put up a new listing. You can't just have a piece of code in your default description text that goes up with every new listing. When Andale does its thing, it sticks a bunch of intrusive stuff advertising Andale and also, because it appears after the listing has gone up, ebay inserts the 'at such and such time/date seller added the following...' text. All this stuff can be manually removed by revising the listing but it's long winded and too much like hard work if you're putting 20 items up at once. Im thinking that the statcounter code would be the same every time and therefore could be put in the default description text in turbo lister.

The reason Statcounter might want to create a custom project type for this is that - firstly - as you say there would be less data extractable and secondly it would be helpful if statcounter extracted the item number from the full page name (it's preceded by "item=") and just displayed that. Being able to extract the item title would require statcounter to buy into the ebay api thing which I guess would be a major issue for them. Nevertheless, I believe ebay integration would be a good long-term wish-list item for statcounter. Being able to get decent, invisible, tracking data for listings would be a major benefit for professional ebay sellers. The key things for me would be:

country
time of day
return visitors versus unique

any comment from the statcounter people?

[webado]

Not a comment from Statcounter, just from me. The title of the page is impossible to obtain except by javascript. If you can't use that on your eBay page, then you're out of luck.
Then all you get is an Ip address (which gives ISP and geo-location informaiton), a date and time of the visit, browser and OS info. That's about it.