OnTheGoSoft
OnTheGoSoft
OnTheGoSoft
Home > Links > Website visitor statistics

Free website visitor tracking

What is a visitor tracking tool?

This web page was made in an effort to assist people trying to improve the effectiveness their web-based business.

Every web-server collects valuable log files, which can be analyzed and used to improve the effectiveness of your website. Web page statistics can also be important in deciding which advertising campaigns are effective and which aren't.

Below, you can download a simple and free Python script, which scans Apache log files. The script prints out a tracking report for each visitor. It shows the visitor source, what trip he did and whether he downloaded executable (and the download size).

This simple and free tool can be very helpful in checking what web surfers are actually doing on your site. These log files can be used to improve the effectiveness of your online business.

This visitor tracking tool filters out automatic visits from download sites (icons, screen shots, validity checks etc.) and only leaves visits from human surfers. This shows what people are doing.

Visitor tracking tool - Output example

Visitor tracking
Produced Sun Feb 15 13:28:41 2004
IP
Date
URL
Source
213.122.11.140 14/Feb/2004:21:39:11 /?referrer=google1 -
205.236.147.60 15/Feb/2004:01:21:08 /?referrer=google3 http://www.google.com/
15/Feb/2004:01:21:34 /download.htm index.htm ?referrer=google3
15/Feb/2004:01:23:15 /contents/pb13_9x.exe (4723843) index.htm download.htm
       
       

Prerequisites

  • To use this tool, your web hosting should support Python scripting (this is more or less standard for Linux based hosting).
  • The path to Python
  • The path to the Apache log file
  • The script filters YOUR requests. To do that, it needs to know what you, and only you access. Take these pages and add them to the 'my_pages' list (see below).

Download and setup

Click here to download the script. Then change the extension to .py and edit it a bit.

These are the first few lines of the script. They would need customizing:

#!/usr/local/bin/python
import string,pickle,os,cgi,time,sys

log_fname = "PUT YOUR PATH HERE"

my_pages = ['/cgi-bin/crawl_demo','ADD SOME MORE PATHS HERE']

Instructions

1. Check the path to Python on your system and possibly correct the 1st line (/usr/local/bin/python)
2. Check the full path to Apache's log file and definitely correct line 4 (log_fname = ...)
3. Set the list of pages that only you visit at line 6 (my_pages = ...). These pages will be excluded from the report, your activity is not displayed the report.
4. Upload the fixed version to the cgi-bin directory, set the permission to 755.
5. To use: open a web browser at:

http://yourdomain/cgi-bin/crawl_demo?hist=<number of entries>?fresh=1
* both the 'hist' and 'fresh' arguments are optional and can be omitted.
* use the 'hist' argument to determine the number of visitors shown in the visitor tracking report.
* use the 'fresh' argument to bypass the internal caching of this script (heavier on your server).

Enjoy this free tool

If this free visitor tracking tool helpful, consider linking back by placing a very modest link to our home page (www.onthegosoft.com). Copy the text below and add it somewhere on your site:

<a href="http://www.onthegosoft.com" target="_blank">Get your backup software from www.onthegosoft.com</a>

If you have a page, which is somewhat related to what we do, let us know, and we can link back to you.


Got a digital camera, CD or DVD burner, but no digital photo backup?
Then you NEED Photo Backup - click here for FREE trial


Products   -   Passport Photo   -   Photo Backup   -   Shrink Pic   -   Resources   -   Partners   -   Blog
© OnTheGoSystems,INC. 2003-2021