My impression of SC4 (reverse DNS and Exit Links)

[Neil Parks]

Statcounter.com is a useful and valuable service. I appreciate your continuing efforts to improve it.

"Visitor paths" is the view I find most useful. In the beta test that view has become less informative because it no longer shows the reverse DNS lookup.

Example:

The old way:

cpe-76-189-209-105.neo.res.rr.com (Road Runner Holdco Llc) [Label IP Address]
Tennessee, Memphis, United States, 1 returning visit

The new way:

76.189.209.105 (Road Runner Holdco Llc) [Label IP Address]
Memphis, Tennessee, United States, 0 returning visits

The old way is better because the "neo" in the reverse DNS info shows that the visitor is in Northeast Ohio. The new way doesn't show that.

"Exit links" has the potential to be very useful. But it has some flaws. For example, several entries on that list are my pages:


Date Time Click
magnify visitor Dec 16 06:40:16 PM http://www.hjcs.org/news.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 06:40:05 PM http://www.hjcs.org/classes.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 06:32:20 PM http://www.hjcs.org/hjcmap.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 06:32:19 PM http://www.hjcs.org/classes.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 06:32:02 PM http://www.hjcs.org/classes.php

All of the above are pages of my site which should not be called "exit links".

magnify visitor Dec 16 06:29:27 PM http://www.ou.org/index.php/takefive/coming_to_shul_early/
magnify visitor Dec 16 01:47:51 PM http://www.hjcs.org/audio/tefila3.mp3
magnify visitor Dec 16 11:09:35 AM http://www.hjcs.org/audio/tefila1.mp3
magnify visitor Dec 16 11:09:29 AM http://www.hjcs.org/audio/tefila2.mp3

Items above are actual exit links.

magnify visitor Dec 16 10:00:32 AM http://www.hjcs.org/index.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 12:49:26 AM http://www.tachash.org/heights/writing.html
magnify visitor Dec 16 12:48:44 AM http://www.hjcs.org/rabbischur.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 12:45:00 AM http://www.hjcs.org/audioclass.php
magnify visitor Dec 16 12:32:23 AM http://www.hjcs.org/audio/0712chanuka1.mp3
magnify visitor Dec 16 12:31:31 AM http://www.hjcs.org/audioclass.php
magnify visitor Dec 15 09:58:39 PM http://www.hjcs.org/audio/tefila1.mp3
magnify visitor Dec 15 07:13:29 PM http://www.hjcs.org/audio/0712chanuka1.mp3
magnify visitor Dec 15 07:12:58 PM http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/
magnify visitor Dec 15 03:57:58 PM http://www.hjcs.org/index.php
magnify visitor Dec 15 03:57:39 PM http://www.hjcs.org/classes.php

Pages (3): [ 1 [2] 3 ]

Items above are some of both. Entries in the www.hjcs.org domain that end in "php" are my pages. Others are genuine exit links.

Also, having to drill down from the exit links to get info on the visitor is too much effort. "Exit links" view would be much more valuable if it could be integrated into "visitor path" view.

[webado]

Did you define the website url in your project settings?

[KVeil]

Re "has become less informative because it no longer shows the reverse DNS lookup" can we add option buttons to select what we want to see?

O Show IP Address
O Show reverse DNS lookup
O Show [Label IP Address] link

This would allow many combinations, eg:

For Neil Parks:
cpe-76-189-209-105.neo.res.rr.com Road Runner Holdco Llc [Label IP Address]
Tennessee, Memphis, United States, 1 returning visit

For me:
Road Runner Holdco Llc
Tennessee, Memphis, United States, 1 returning visit

For others maybe:
76.189.209.105 Road Runner Holdco Llc [Label IP Address]
Tennessee, Memphis, United States, 1 returning visit

If I had one wish for a StatCounter enhancement, I would chose: "More Configurability"!!! (and that my chosen settings are remembered)

K

[KVeil]

Oh, I just realized that there is a bug in this format:

xxxxxxxxxx
Tennessee, Memphis, United States, 1 returning visit


It should be

xxxxxxxxxx
Memphis, Tennessee, United States, 1 returning visit

I recall having reported this some months ago in another part of StatCounter and it was fixed!

Thanks

K

[Neil Parks]

Did you define the website url in your project settings?
Yes. I entered 3 domains in the "website URL" box:
http://www.hjcs.org
http://hjc.bluehome.net
http://hjcs.org

[webado]

SC4 has a list of extensions to consider for exit links, such as mp3, pdf, etc. Is it possible php is among them?

[Neil Parks]

Is it possible php is among them?
If it is, I would call that a bug.

[webado]

I mean take a look at what you have there. You can change it I believe.

Actually I don't remember where I saw that list mentioned ... Need to dig some more.

[webado]

Ok, the file types being tracked as downloads are:

var dlext = "7z|aac|avi|csv|doc|exe|flv|gif|gz|jpe?g|js|mp(3|4| e?g)|mov|pdf|phps|png|ppt|rar|sit|tar|torrent|txt| wma|wmv|xls|xml|zip";


I see phps in there. Not sure why.

But not php.


Besides my own stuff works fine and all my pages are typically .php.

However what I found out is if the visitor visited the cached copy of one of my web pages, then anything they click from there (including all my own internal links) will be deemed to be an exit link, since it's on a different domain than the domain of the cached page (which may be Google).

[Neil Parks]

However what I found out is if the visitor visited the cached copy of one of my web pages, then anything they click from there (including all my own internal links) will be deemed to be an exit link, since it's on a different domain than the domain of the cached page (which may be Google).
I haven't seen any hits on Google cached copies of my pages.

As to the domain being different, if (a) the domain is specified in the "website URL" listing (as we discussed above) and (b) the page has Statcounter code making it part of this project, then logically it should not be identified as an "exit link".

[webado]

Yes, indeed. But I am saying the only thing I have seen is a case of one of my own pages being listed as an exit link and the explnation was that it had been clicked from a Google cached copy of another of my pages. That is the page that was visited was from Google's cache, like:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:Uc8G7TntTGUJ:www.webado.net/+site:webado.net&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1

The visit to the cache is logged as normal, that is the url of the page that's visited. Any link clicked from there would be an exit link.

[Neil Parks]

"Visitor paths" is the view I find most useful. In the beta test that view has become less informative because it no longer shows the reverse DNS lookup.

Glad to see that the reverse DNS now shows up in Visitor Paths.

[Neil Parks]

Glad to see that the reverse DNS now shows up in Visitor Paths.
And now it has been turned off again. (: