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ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus?

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ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus?
I am trying to figure out exactily what the ExtraStats plugin stats are counting. There is a discrepancy between the Hits field in the Links SQL database and the stats in the ExtraStats plugin?
What exactly is each counting?

Is it counting the number of times someone clicks thru to the links website (via jump.cgi) or is it counting the number of page views of the detailed page.

I am interested in having both of the these stats available so we can calculate clickthru rates for the detailed pages.

Is this possible?

Best regards,

Christian
mySummerCamps.com
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Hi Christian,

ExtraStats counts clicks through jump.cgi. It counts both all clickthroughs and unique clickthroughs (separately). The Hits field in the Links table is for unique clickthroughs - so for any links added this month, the monthly unique hits from ExtraStats should be the same as the Hits field in Links. I've just checked several links in my database and this is the case - please can you let me know if this isn't true on your site as I'll need to investigate why.

If you want to track hits to detailed pages, you can either use Pugdog's detail page plugin which counts overall hits to detail pages, or you can use ExtraStats and link to detailed pages using jump.cgi?Detailed=<%ID%> (but in this case you will not be able to distinguish between hits to detailed pages and clickthroughs to the link) or you can use SiteStats which tracks daily and monthly views of any pages on your site.

Laura.
The UK High Street
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Redoing detail_page.cgi is on my list.

I didn't know how many sites use it, and just how useful it *really* is for displaying the dynamic detail pages. It's one of those things like a shell script you write once because you need it, and bang your head around, but then don't ever look at it until something breaks <G>

There are quite a few improvements I need to add, and I'm going to try to get it do a few more things behind the scenes for tracking hits.

I'm also going to update the advanced search logger, since I have some better template code, and a look that meshes with google's adsense, and will finally add some admin features.

for the new look check http://debtcure.com/...nkSQL/search.cgi?d=1

Also, FWIW: "hits" vs "detailed_hits" are what I track. A "hit" is a clickthrough to the site, ie: if a person goes to the detailed page, then clicks through to the site. a "detailed_hit" is just a view of the detailed page, without a clickthrough to the site. These were stats I wanted for postcards.com where I wanted to know how many people viewed the images, as well as how many sent them.

later versions of detail_page installed a new hit type in the click track table, to prevent duplicate counting of re-hits.

Unfortunately, because I work late, and GT's database had been hacked a few times, I can never remember, or find the password to update the plugins in the plugins area, so I tended to end up posting most fixes/updates to the forums. (That too will change, as I'll to post most fixes and updates to the sqlwidgets.com site, rather than burrying it here in the forums)

(part of what andy and I are doing is trying to update all our plugins to the most recent/fixed up versions, then eliminate all others from our workspaces, and we've asked Alex to update all our plugins to reflect the Ultranerds username. Once that happens, there'll be two of us to try to remember the password <G>).


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [afinlr] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Laura

I am back to trying to figure out the difference on our site mysummercamps.com

For example on of our listings has the LinksSQL hits field = 143 but the ExtraStats plugin says (I changed Hits to Referrals in the template)

ID : 5709, YEAR : 2004 Unique Referrals: 1304 All Referrals: 1374

The breakdown by month is:
388 327 339 250
Jan Feb Mar Apr

The ExtraStats numbers fit with our traffic more than the LinksSQL numbers.

Does LinksSQL Hits field get reset?

Regards

Christian

mySummerCamps.com
http://www.mysummercamps.com
There's a GREAT summer camp out there!
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Hi Christian,

That sounds strange.

The Hits field definitely doesn't get reset in the ExtraStats plugin. Do all your links look similar - i.e. the number of hits this month in ExtraStats is greater than the total number of Hits in the Links table? If so, I think that you must have reset the Hits field sometime earlier this month (people sometimes do this to get more up-to-date popular links). If not, something very strange is going on.
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Re: [afinlr] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Yes this is the case for all of our Links. The Hits field in Links must be getting reset at some point in time but unfortunately we are having a difficult time figuring this out.

I like the stats from ExtraStats much more than LinksSQL as far as the reported Hits. They make us feel better about our site traffic. I am just trying to understand why there is such a huge discrepancy.

CV
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Well it does sound as though your Hits field was reset earlier this month. I'm not aware of any plugin that will do this so my guess would be that you did this with a mysql statement - but it would be strange if you can't remember doing that Unsure. Searching the forum for 'reset hits' there are quite a lot of posts. Maybe you could have read one of these and not realised that the command you used would reset the hits? Unless there is a plugin which does this? I can't think of any other way it could have happened.
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Ok here is what happens.

When I click on one of the camp listings on our site with the URL http://www.mysummercamps.com/...2F23920.html&d=1 ExtraStats records 2 hits for this but LinksSQL does not record any.

When I subsequently click on the jump.cgi link http://www.mysummercamps.com/...cgi?ID=23920&d=1 ExtraStats again records 2 hits for this and LinksSQL records 1.

So it appears that for every click ExtraStats is recording 4 hits.

When I go from a static link such as http://www.mysummercamps.com/.../Detailed/23900.html it counts 3 hits for the click to the Detailed page and counts a single hit for the jump.cgi link http://www.mysummercamps.com/...ps/jump.cgi?ID=23900

So again it appears that for every click ExtraStats is recording 4 hits.

I thought the problem was with Links initially but now I am not so sure. It definitely appears that ExtraStats is not counting the hits correctly.
I did these tests within a matter of seconds so although it is possible somebody else could have clicked on the links it is highly unlikely.

We are running ExtraStats 2.2.8 afinlr

Any ideas?


Christian
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Hi,

Firstly, I can't see any way that ExtraStats can be recording hits for clicks on detail pages - there is no mechanism in the plugin for this. However, if it is collecting incorrect values for clickthroughs via jump.cgi I would need to take a look at your installation to see whether I can work out what is going on. This definitely isn't happening on my site and I haven't had any other reported problems like this.

If you pm your login details I'll see whether I can work out where the discrepancy is coming from.

Laura.
The UK High Street
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Re: [afinlr] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Laura

I do not know how or where, all I can tell you is what I found while doing some detailed testing to figure out why there is this discrepancy.

I have sent you temporary login details. Please let me know what you find. We run a pretty heavily modified version of LinksSQLa but the crew at GT do not think it is anything they have done.

Christian
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Re: [afinlr] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Laura

Any progress.

Here is the only rewrite rule we are using:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*L([0-9]+).*\.html$ /camps/Detailed/$1.html [L]

with the following Template Global

sub {
my $ID = shift;
my $Title = shift;
$Title =~ y/ \t\r\n?"'#/__/d;
return $CFG->{build_detail_url} . '/' . $Title . '_L' . $ID . '.html';
}


Hopefully we can figure this out as soon as possible.

Christian
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Hi,

Sorry I haven't managed to work out what is going on yet. It is very strange as the jump_link plugin hook is being called when the detailed page is being viewed - and I can't find any logical reason for this yet as I'm sure it shouldn't be doing that.

I'll have another look this evening if I get a chance - but I'm a bit stuck as to what is going on at the moment.

Laura.
The UK High Street
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
Found it! Phew - I thought I was going mad last time I looked at this as I couldn't think of any logic for the way it was behaving.

Right, the problem is that you are using jump.cgi to show images on your detail pages. Everytime the image is loaded, the jump_link hook is run and ExtraStats records a new hit.

One way to solve this would be to use a different way to show the images. I'm not sure about the pros and cons of the different ways of displaying images but I had always thought using jump.cgi was not a good idea as it would increase the load on the server - but I know that GT has done a lot of modifications on your site so maybe this was their suggestion?

Anyway, I think I should be able to modify the plugin to ignore these image calls (though I haven't investigated this thoroughly yet so I'm not certain).

Laura.
The UK High Street
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Re: [orthonet] ExtraStats Differential Between Detailed views and Clickthrus? In reply to
I've uploaded a new version which should hopefully fix this problem.

Laura.