This is a bit premature as I haven't finished this plugin but I hope it should be ready within the next couple of weeks (maybe sooner).

I would like to know what sort of stats people would like to see from a stats plugin. You can already get information about your link hits from the ExtraStats plugin so this would be more general information such as pageviews.

Its a couple of months since I've looked at this so I'll have another look at it tomorrow and see just how far I've got and give some more description about what it might involve.

Laura.
The UK High Street

A few ideas:

- Total Unique users
- Total Registered users
- Total New users
- Average time spent on the site
- Top 25 pages visited
- Top entry and exit points
- Top 50 countries
- Total page views
- Total cached pages

All of the above daily/weekly/monthly

Probably ambitious

Klaus

---

http://www.ameinfo.com

Well its good to know what you want but the first version at least will probably be a bit simpler than this! I'll keep these in mind while I'm designing it though.

• Total Unique visitors - definitely
• Total Registered users and Total New users - do you mean that you want the Total Registered Users available as a tag - or the number of registered users who visited the site during a particular time period? I think that as tags they may both fit better into the ExtraStats plugin as they are more about your links setup than site statistics.
• Average time spent on the site - I'm thinking about how to do this but it may be possible
• Top 25 pages visited - I think this should be in
• Top entry and exit points - I think this should be in (entry pages at least)
• Top 50 countries - I don't think so
• Total page views - Definitely
• Total cached pages - I'm not sure about this - it's not something I've thought about before.

Just to let you know, I'm not planning on collecting country data at all at the moment as I think this will involve too much processing. I assume that it would involve doing a hostname lookup for each IP and then converting this to a country.

I think that I'll try to make the data available daily and monthly in a similar way to ExtraStats but weekly is not as easy.

• total pageviews (and maybe unique visitors) by category

Regards,
Manu

Shopping Portal Shop-Netz.de® | Partnerprogramme | Flugreisen & Billigflüge | KESTERMEDIA e.K. | European Affiliate Marketing Forum.

A new thread for a new product!
I"d love to see this product become a reality.

Here are some stats ideas. (some may be way off base, or duplicates, but I will throw out a quantity anyways)


* Most stats should be available overall as well as by Category.

* The ability to not list (de-list) specific Categories would be valuable.

==================
* Top Categories by Hits IN
* Top Categories by Hits Out
* Top 20 Links In
* Top 20 Links Out

Historical:
(Nice bar chart and numerical table)

Links Added - day/month/week/year
Links Submitted - day/week/month/year
Reviews Submited - day/week/month/year
Users Added - day/week/month/year
Searches Made - day/week/month/year

Alexis Rank by month. (parse web page)



More on Search terms:

* Top x search terms, comparable month by month ((side by side columns)
* Search terms popularity up/down

* Top x search terms for specific period.
all search terms

USERS
* Top 10 users.
* Top 10 reviewers
For fraud or spamming checking:
* E-mail address used to submit multiple entries

Right, this is a general 'what I think this plugin is for' post.

There are two plugins which I intend to keep separate as some people will want the functionality from one and not the other and they have both taken quite a bit of time for me to develop. Also they are easy to split as they are collecting the data in completely different ways.

The ExtraStats plugin, already released, is for statistics about your Links database. At the moment this gives extra statistics for the hit data. I *may* develop this so that it also gives 'in hits' if that is what people want as I think this is an obvious extension (and hopefully no-one will think that I'm treading on their toes) - I need to have a look at this but I may build this on the back of Ian's remote count plugin - so that it will give you this information if you have Ian's plugin but I'm not sure about this yet. I think it would be a pretty straightforward development to give top lists by category if people want that.

The new SiteStats plugin will involve an image being placed on your pages which count the number of pageviews and collect unique user information. There will be a field which you can group pages on - so for example you can tag a page as a category page and then show the top categories today, the top detail pages this month, etc. This is NOT a substitute for a log file analysis and I am not intending it to be an in-depth analysis of your visitors. It is generally intended to give you more information about the popularity of different parts of your directory. You can leave the image off any pages that you don't want to be counted. I think that I will probably provide a counter to show visits to the whole site, that category, that page, etc. but this may not be for the first version.

Webslicer, I think that most of your suggestions are looking for information that is already in the databases and many of them already exist in other plugins - for example all the search data should be available from the SearchLogger plugin and I certainly do not intend to include this in either of my plugins. The top users are available in Ian's UserMonitor plugin and I think that his toolbox plugin also has some general statistics about your installation. I'm not sure about the etiquette of redoing bits of other people's already existing plugins? If I were to include any of this I think it would all fit better into the ExtraStats plugin anyway and I'll have another look at this after I get the new one released.

Any comments?

In answer;

The SearchLogger plugin does store the raw search info, but does not track key phrases month to month.

Most plugins show a snapshot or the sum of all data collected.

I'd like to have a single plugin to keep general stats where a webmaster can look at site activity over a period of time, see it in bar graph form, and also analyze what categories and links over time are more popular and have changes in activity.

I can not get this at present even by combining the plugins that you mention.

Some of this information could be extracted from the databases, but click stats on individual links are not kept.



Most of the plugins available do not keep HISTORICAL data.

For example, UM, which is a well written and extremely comprehensive solution for tracking and rewarding individual users, does not track users joined per month, for example. It stores and displays detailed info on individual users.

Toolbox
Very useful, mainly for its repair and spider functions. Nothing historical, though. I have never gotten the "Latest Searches" function to work, so do not know what it will show. I may have the wrong version of "SearchLogger" installed. What version is required?

Other thoughts:

Your own ExtraStats plugin, if it were to break down the stats by category would be close.

A bar graph showing the top 5 categories each month, with multiple months visible, would be useful.

Ok. It does track the phrases but I agree that the stats are not currently built into the plugin in an easy to use form. I think the best way forward might be to use the data from SearchLogger and provide the statistics in ExtraStats. SearchLogger is actually one of the few plugins which does provide historical data - you just need to know how to display it. I'll need to find out how to check whether a plugin is installed first.



I see what you mean about the snapshot. Collecting the data on a daily/monthly basis is quite memory intensive which is probably why people have stayed away from it. I will have a go at seeing what else I can add into the ExtraStats plugin.



Maybe I'll try to get the category breakdown in ExtraStats first as - having not really investigated it at all - I think it should be straightforward I may be sorry for saying that when I'm still working on it in six months time!



When you say top 5 categories what do you mean by 'top'? Do you mean the categories with the most visited links? And would you want the bars to show the total number of link hits in that category? If you want the category pageviews then this will be in the SiteStats plugin.

I have your extrastats plugin and think its great, however since I started using GoCart (shopping cart plugin), I have switched my product pages over to linkssqls detailed pages. Now I am not getting stats on my products. Is it possible to alter the extrastats plugin to reflect detailed page views?
Robert
http://www.thevillagegreenery.com

I'll have a look and see what I can do.

Hi,

Are you talking about the enhanced search logger?

That tracks searches/keywords per day, and the database can be picked for data.

I've thought about enhancing the logging, for stats, such that any action that alters/views the database will generate a log entry. Trouble is, raw logs get messy, and abreviated logs get intensive or start to have to chose what data they pick.

For instance, log-ons per day. You could keep one log entry for each logon, or you could keep one log record for _every_ logon for that calendar day, incrementing the count by one. You could also keep a record such as username/date/count/datetime to track what usernames logged on on each date, the number of times they logged on, and their last logon for that date. That would get _huge_

What data do you want to see collected, and how? What is the most useful data set?

Personally, I'm still waiting for Community, and central remote logons so I can merge all my sites into 3 main communities, and at that point,statistics become _important_. Each program, like Links and Forum need to have individual stats, and audit trails, but most importantly are overall stats from the "community" as to what users are most active, least active (why?), where they are coming from, what they are doing, what they are looking for, what they actually find, etc.

"demographics" are less important, in the traditional sense. I don't care where they live, or how many kids they have, etc. I am more interested in what they are actually doing -- or not doing -- on the sites.

You may disagree... or your site may depend on demographic profiling.


PS: anything I release from this point on is "free" GPL type programming, so anyone who is also releasing anything "free" to the community, and wants to share efforts, and not duplicate the wheel, the help would be much appreciated by me, and everyone else :) It will mean more programs sooner, and better, for everyone. Actually, "good" code should eventually be incorporated into Links, so it doesn't have to run as a "plugin" and becomes "core" code. It will make life easier and more pleasant for everyone :) [[ although, programs like Adobe Photoshop are virtually _all_ plugins.... so maybe keeping features as plugins, but making better plugin code is the answer?? ]]


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.

Would be nice to have page navigation for starters :-)

Klaus

---

http://www.ameinfo.com

While searching for details about your ExtraStats
plug-in I happened across this thread.

Does your ExtraStats plug-in or this next one coming up have the ability for the user to check their own stats? And I can't find the post---

The way things are now, you can't get 'links by User' but by each individual link, I suppose, without a hack. How about when the user is logged in they can (only related to their links) see on their Bio page or account area the traffic ranks, etc. and they can check them out - and I think an export feature would be good for this too. When you're offering paid services, users want to know what traffic they're getting. And offering a downloadable report to Excel or something like this would be nice - CVS is the thing.

Say I wanted to do a custom GT toolbar - maybe we can think ahead and you can make some of these user stats available so I could plug them into the Toolbar ??? Of course this would be nice for anybody with a portal or wanting to increase traffic back...Just talking out loud--

If I get the exisitng ExtraStats will I be able to upgrade when the new one comes out - or will I need the two separate installs...and what about overlapping?


For more tracking ideas, you take a look at Alexa.com. (mentioned above) or urchin.com (won't use it though) - these are some popular statistics they offer all users.

Keep up the good work - thanks!

Darn,

I didn't run everybody off did I?

I hope not!

I'd love to see this excellent plugin upgraded!

These days it really is a must.

Hi,

Sorry everyone - as soon as I put some time aside to concentrate on this I got a big project that took all my time. I'll try to get down to looking at this again in the next few days.

Laura.
The UK High Street

I'm very much looking forward to it!

Hi,

Sorry for the delay - I'm going to attempt to answer this now.

In ExtraStats you can add the stats/graphs to any page - so if you have a profile page for a user you can add the graphs for their links to that page, or you could add tags which show the graphs/stats for their links within the detailed page for their links if they are logged in.

Can you describe exactly what you mean by 'links by User' - do you want a total hits for all their links? Wouldn't they find it more useful to see the breakdown? For example you could have a table with headings like this:

Link | Hits Today | Hits Yesterday | Hits This Month | Hits Last Month

Traffic Ranks (i.e. a ranking within your directory) is something I'm looking into as someone else has also requested it. I'm not sure how this will be implemented yet.

As far as I can see, a downloadable report in csv should be pretty straightforward. I'm adding some new tags to the next update so that you should be able to generate a file like this using loops for the hits for the current month (or any month you specify - and similarly monthly hits for the year):

ID,Type,1,2,3,....,29,30,31
221,All Hits,23,34,28,....,19,23,41
221,Unique Hits,21,31,25,....,12,23,36

I hope this is something like what you want? If not, can you explain more?

I'm not sure how the toolbar works but if it can read in the ID of a link (say on the link's detailed page) and use Links tags then I can't see why you wouldn't be able to add these stats to it.

The new plugin (extremely delayed I know) will not overlap with this one and will definitely be released as a separate plugin to avoid confusion - and because this one is already rather complicated as there are a huge number of tags you can use. ExtraStats is just collecting extra information about the clickthroughs for the links in your directory. The new one (if/when it is released) is collecting information about pageviews to your directory and the stats will be collected in a completely different way.

I hope that answers some of your questions.

Laura.
The UK High Street