Global site-independant visitor tracking and ranking.
 

Hi Guys,

A while ago there was a discussion on this board about the ability to track if a surfer had been to other sites and then route trades based on this information.

I have developed a service (still in Alpha but requiring testing) that does just this. At the top of your website you embed a JavaScript which tracks hits sent by this visitor and assigns the visitor a unique tracking cookie. When the visitor then goes to another site also using this JavaScript, a new hit is recorded against them in the database.

This script tracks both on a visitor cookie and the user's IP address and returns this information to the page in the form of JavaScript variables.

The script to use is:

This JavaScript returns the following variables:

visitor24Hours
A 2 dimensional array containing the domains and number of hits this visitor has made in the past 24 hours. e.g.


visitor7Days
A 2 dimensional array containing the above info but for the past 7 days.

ip24Hours
A 2 dimensional array containing the above info for the past 24 hours but instead of using the visitor's cookie, it is based on the user's IP address.

ip7Days
Same as for ip24Hours but for the past 7 days.

visitorLastMinutes
How many minutes since the visitor last hit this page.

ipLastMinutes
How many minutes since the visitor's IP last hit this page.

totalVisitorDays and totalVisitorDaysPast
The number of days (totalVisitorDays) in the past x number of days (totalVisitorDaysPast) the user has been to this website.

totalIPDays and totalIPDaysPast
Same as above but based on the user's IP address.

visitFromCountry
The name of the country the visitor comes from.

If you have any queries, please don't hesitate to drop me a line at kondro [at] gmail [dot] com

The website the visitor comes from is automatically tracked based on the referrer address.

There doesn't appear to be any problems with tracking cookies either. I have tested this code with IE6, Safari and FireFox and with standard settings, the cookies all get accepted. If not, the tracking info will still work based on the user's IP address (although I am not sure how useful this will be if the user is from AOL, etc as these IPs will probably be from proxy servers).

I am particularly interested in chatting with some trade script developers for the potential to integrate this service into their product. So, if you are a developer of such a product, I would love to hear from you about a potential partnership exclusive or non-exclusive.

Also, as this is a test service, I would not recommend putting it on large, production websites however, this service has been load tested up to about 15 million hits per day before starting to slow down.

Note, I am constantly on the lookout for programming work, if you are interested in a high-level PHP, MySQL, JavaScript programmer with some business sense, give me a holla

Thank you everyone for your time and support,

Kondro
kondro [at] gmail [dot] com

Wow, I can't believe how fast things fall off this board.

Bump :)

NOt sure that I have the time to try to set this up, and if others dont use it, then it is usless, but here is a friendly bump for you.

I agree that this is defintely something that, the more people who use it, the better it works. That is the main reason why I would like to JV with a trade script creator. This way it would be built into a number of sites already.

For it it be useful to you, only you and your direct trading partners need to use this. It would be valuable even if only some of your trading partners were using this service.

Also, if you notice above, the script does provide some info about the surfer that might be useful even without knowing the other sites they have been to (like the country, the number of visits in the past 'x' days as well as the number of visits to 'your' domain in the domain arrays).

I know your focus is on the tech side of this issue (good solution), but you may want to bear in mind that some major mainstream players got into trouble by consolidating data across multiple sites without properly disclosing it in the Privacy Policies.

I'm sure the popup blocker bypassers won't care about this, but this approach may violate privacy issues if not backed up with appropriate disclosures.

In any case, kondro, drop me an email to discuss your technical future:

Contact Dino Cortez

Thanks,
-Dino