You can get quite a bit of information about your visitors
without having to use a third party tracking software. I'll
outline the PHP commands you can use to capture some of this
data. The details you capture can be saved into a database, and
retrieved later to check your site's performance and user
details. The following information is captured using the server
variable ($_SERVER) which is available from PHP 4.10 onwards.
Visitor's IP address :
You can get the visitor's IP address using the following
command:
This will give you the vistor's IP address. You can use this
along with an ip to country converter database to see from which
country your visitors are come in from. You can head over to http://ip-to-country
.webhosting.info/ for one such script.
You can use PHP to resolve the ip address to a domain name to
get the visitor's ISP in most cases. The ISP's domain will show
up if PHP is able to resolve the IP to a proper domain. You can
do this as follows. |
$ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
$visitor_host = @getHostByAddr( $ip );
?> |
Note : On some servers, using getHostByAddr to resolve domains
may cause the script to slow down.
Referring Page :
You can capture the referring page, which will give you an
indication of which site is sending traffic to you.
This will give you the entire URL from which the visitor came to
your site. For example if the visitor came from a google search
for "i-pod", the referrer url would look something
like this :
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=i-pod&hl=en&lr=&ie=U
TF-8&start=50
If you don't want the entire URL captured, but just the domain
name stored into the database, you can strip the rest of the URL
and save it to the database like so: |
$referrer_page =
parse_url(htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])))
;
?> |
This will save the referring page as :
http://www.google.co.in/
The page being Accessed :
You can also capture the page being accessed on your server.
This information will help you evaluate which parts of your site
is getting more page views.
A more advanced user can also use this information to create a
click-stream of the user. A click-stream is the path that a user
follows while he goes through your site. This lets you see how
effective your site's navigation is.
If the visitor is accessing your page,
http://www.yourdomain.com/guestbook.php, the requested page
would be 'guestbook.php'.
These pieces of information will help you build a visitor
tracker in PHP, which will be able to tell you quite a bit about
your visitors and how they use your site.
About the author:
Vinu Thomas is a consultant on Webdesign and Internet
Technologies.
His website is http://www.vinuthomas.com
He is presently consulting http://www.indiaresortss
urvey.com
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