Soup tasters

We've invited existing subscribers to pass comment on FlySoup's web analytics service in order to give potential subscribers the confidence to take the plunge and sign up for a trial. You'll find a growing list of positive feedback below.

All I'm seeing is the default page!

This is a follow up to Show me some ID in which I wrote about how to get the full path to show up in your latest page views report when your site content is dynamically generated.

What I didn't cover was a quirk relating to a site's index page. In FlySoup this defaults to, well... 'default', regardless of any query string.

So what happens if your dynamic content is based off a page called index.php. All you see is 'default page'. Not particularly useful.

Here's the work around.

As before, you will need to make a small adjustment to the tracking script.

In the tracking script, change
wa_pageName=location.pathname; // you can customize the page name here

to read
wa_pageName=' '+location.pathname+location.search;

In the changed line, you can leave just a space between the two single quotes, or you can make it 'your site name' or 'Page ' or something similar. Whatever you put will precede the page name and query string.

Show me some id

Dynamically generated web pages will have a url containing a query string that might look something like this:

www.test.com/somedirectory/some.php?id=41&pageno=1

Taking the example shown above, the default set-up for the FlySoup tracking code will show some.php as the page visited in your stats report.

What most subscribers with dynamic/content managed sites will want to know is the specific id and page number in order that a more granular interpretation of the stats is possible.

location.search will do this for you.

To get the full query string make the following change in the tracking script:

look for and change wa_pageName=location.pathname; // you can customize the page name here

to read wa_pageName=location.pathname+location.search;

In an ideal world, your web designers would also use URL rewriting to provide a more intuitive URL so that as well as the script returning the full query string it does so in plain English rather than id=41&pageno=1.

How to avoid being a statistic

When was the last time you, or somebody from your company, visited your web site. It's quite possible that you represent one of the most frequent of returning visitors.

When analysing your traffic via FlySoup you probably don't want your own visits to muddy the figures. To avoid this you need to add your own I.P. address to an exclusion list. You do this by clicking on the '>Exclude IP Ranges From Tracking' link under the 'Account' '>Setup' menu.

Bear in mind if you are accessing your FlySoup stats from different locations - your desk bound office workstation and your laptop at home for example - then you will need to exclude both sets of I.P. addresses.

Your I.P. address is a a series of two and three digit numbers in four groups, separated by full stops. Like this, for example: 195.99.172.141 (an I.P. address that referenced The Equal Opportunities Commission mentioned in an earlier post).

How do you find your I.P. address?

FlySoup makes it easy to find and add the I.P. address of the machine you are currently using to access your stats. For a start it tells you what your I.P address is. So when you click the link to add a new range, simply put in the I.P. address it gives you as a starting address and for your finishing range address use the same number with the last digit increased by one. So if the last number was 141, make it 142.

This is all you need if you are the only one in the company accessing the site. If there are many people in the company who might reasonably be expected to be trawling the site on a regular basis then you will want to make the range wide enough to accommodate all the local I.P. address variants.

Any future traffic from I.P. addresses you have nominated in this way will be ignored and excluded from your stats.