Question

I want to develop a PHP website feature where users sign up, get a javascript snippet code that display an image on their site, and let’s me track the number of visitors, unique hits, clicks and average visitor duration on their page. Is that something that should be done with some open source analytic software such as http://piwik.org/ or it’s pretty doable on your own?

If I had to do it myself from scratch, I would use image/pixel as a way to track the visit, drop a cookie with javascript snippet to track uniques, track clicks based on image click and redirect, and not sure about the bounce rate.

Any thoughts or opinions are welcome.

Answer 1

To record the traffic is very simple. BUT, and that’s a big but for a few things to keep in mind:

• Creating reports based on your traffic log will be a lot more complicated in comparison
• Your server needs to be very fast and can keep up with the traffic otherwise the websites you are tracking will appear to load slower and the owners will not be very happy
• Depending on how many and how busy the websites you are tracking, you may need a server or a cluster of servers with quite big storage and processing power

If you are thinking about doing this for commercial purpose, there’s already a few pretty big players in this space so do some research before making big commitments.