I need to track only human visits to my article pages. I hear that SiteCatalyst is the best of the best for page tracking. Here is what I am trying to do. I need to track every human visit if possible because this will affect the amount of money i have to pay. I will need to download site statistics for all of my pages with an accurate hit count. Again, I don’t want to track spiders/bots. Once I download the site statistics I will use it to update hit counts to each of my articles. Then I will pay my writers according to how many hits they receive. Is SiteCatalyst able to do this. If not, who do you think can do something like this?
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Luke – Quick answer there currently is no %100 accurate way to get this.
Omniture’s SiteCatalyst does provide a very good tool for acquiring visitor information. You can acquire visitor information from any of the other vendors as well including the free option Google Analytics.
You may have been lead to believe as I had that Omniture strips out all bots and spiders by default. Omniture states that most bots and spiders do not load images or execute JavaScript, which is what they rely upon for tracking. I am not sure what the exact percentage is, but not all bots and spiders act in this way.
In order for you to gain a more accurate report on the number of “humans” you will need to know what the IP address of the visitor is and possibly the user agent. You can populate the agent and IP in PHP with these two variables $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] and $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]. You will then need to strip out the IP address of known bots/spiders from your reporting. You can do this with lists like this: http://www.user-agents.org/index.shtml or manually by looking at the user agent. Beware of relying upon the user agent as the bot can easily spoof this. This will never be %100 accurate because new bots/spiders pop up every day. I suggest looking further into “click fraud”.
Contact me if you want further info.