Analytics for the backend of a site

fragglecrowley

Lookingf for pointers...
We have a website that customers sign up to, and they avail of our service through a login. We have about 140 customers now and we are looking for a system to track ‘back-end’ customer usage accurately.
We want to be able to track the most active customers, see who comes in regularly, uses it most often, comes and goes etc?. I think we need increased visibility on how/how customers are using the system. Some kind of dashboard or report to show activity matched to users. We need something specific, rather than google analytics, which certainly tracks visitors but not who, if you know what I mean….
Any ideas on this?

blue4ever

Let me get this correct: you want to track individual Registered users as opposed to registered users as a homogeneous group?

Are you using a particular CMS?

C

Trojan

You might have to build a custom dashboard, and build in usage records into the profile.

Alternatively, it might be simple to tweak your URL structure so that it captures certain variables and that could be recorded by existing analytics tracking.

You'll also need to consider data protection issues and take a look at what terms of service your existing and future customers signed up to.

fragglecrowley

blue4ever wrote: »

Let me get this correct: you want to track individual Registered users as opposed to registered users as a homogeneous group?

Are you using a particular CMS?

C

Yep, that's it exactly. We use expression engine. We have 140 customers, growing at about 5 per month. We need to know what areas of the service they use most etc (per customer) once signed up...

Fraggle

fragglecrowley

Trojan wrote: »

You might have to build a custom dashboard, and build in usage records into the profile.

Alternatively, it might be simple to tweak your URL structure so that it captures certain variables and that could be recorded by existing analytics tracking.

You'll also need to consider data protection issues and take a look at what terms of service your existing and future customers signed up to.

We can build something, but would prefer to buy an off the shelf solution or a Saas service, as our IT guys are seriously backed up on other priorities. Appreciate the advice re data protection, will check that out.

Surely there are lots of companies that track registered customer usage behind a login wall? Customer x came in 5 times last week and spent most of his time on the y page... etc etc...

Fraggle

blue4ever

Tracking individual progress on a site is counter to Googles T+C's and is specifically disallowed under their privacy rules, so that might be an issue.

I'd take a look at "Piwik" it's an open source analytics. I dont know how good you are under the hood, but its fairly easy to install - upload a folder, add some code to your page(s). I'm nearly positive you can track individuals and like t said above its a amend to their page tracking.

It's a nice alternative to G's analytics. One heads up: you will be storing the tracking data in your own DB. It can grow serious legs if you're not careful, massive amount of data is stored!

fragglecrowley

blue4ever wrote: »

Tracking individual progress on a site is counter to Googles T+C's and is specifically disallowed under their privacy rules, so that might be an issue.

I'd take a look at "Piwik" it's an open source analytics. I dont know how good you are under the hood, but its fairly easy to install - upload a folder, add some code to your page(s). I'm nearly positive you can track individuals and like t said above its a amend to their page tracking.

It's a nice alternative to G's analytics. One heads up: you will be storing the tracking data in your own DB. It can grow serious legs if you're not careful, massive amount of data is stored!

Thanks B4E. Will do.

Trojan

What I was talking about with the URL creation should still be possible, e.g. you could write URLs like this:

www.example.com/members/featureA/1234

or

www.example.com/members/featureA?user=1234

where the number is their user id. Then you could see in your analytics (even in Google Analytics, though check out the ToU like mentioned above):

www.example.com/members/featureA?user=1234 1200 visits
www.example.com/members/featureB?user=1234 10 visits
www.example.com/members/featureA?user=0001 5 visits
www.example.com/members/featureB?user=0001 8 visits

etc

I don't know Expression Engine, but I know it would be fairly easy to code something like that for WordPress.

You could even do it in a way that doesn't show in the URL, by passing a query string to an element on the page.