Question

I’ve created a web tracking system that simply insert an event information (click or page view) into a simple SQL server table:

 Column    |  Type       | NULL?
-------------------------------------
RequestId  | bigint      | NOT NULL
PagePath   | varchar(50) | NOT NULL
EventName  | varchar(50) | NULL
Label      | varchar(50) | NULL
Value      | float       | NULL
UserId     | int         | NOT NULL
LoggedDate | datetime    | NOT NULL

How can I harvest/analayze/display this raw information?

Answer 1

First decide what trends you are most interested in. Perhaps looking at some existing web analytics software – there is free software available – to see what options exist.

If your requirements are simple, you have enough data. If you want a breakdown of which countries are accessing your website, you need to log IP addresses and get a database that ties IP ranges to countries – these are not 100% reliable but will get you fairly good accuracy.

Some simple examples of reporting you can do with your current data:

• Number of hits per hour, day, week, month
• Top 20 accessed pages
• Top Users
• Number of users accessing the site per hour, day, week, month
• etc.

Most of these you can pull with a single SQL query using the group by clause and date functions.

Example MS SQL Server query to achieve hits per day (untested):

SELECT COUNT(RequestID) AS NumberOfHits, 
  YEAR(LoggedDate) AS EventYear, 
  MONTH(LoggedDate) AS EventMonth, 
  DAY(LoggedDate) AS EventDay
FROM MyTable
GROUP BY YEAR(LoggedDate), MONTH(LoggedDate), DAY(LoggedDate)
ORDER BY YEAR(LoggedDate), MONTH(LoggedDate), DAY(LoggedDate)