Need to gather statistics on my web page!

[Guest marline]

Yahoo say's to add this code to my php pages to gather statistics on any php pages! Does any one know what page I need to add this code to, and where to put it in the page.

<!-- Counter/Statistics -->

<?php $TimeStamp = time();

$VisitURL = "\"http://visit.webhosting.yahoo.com/visit.gif?".$TimeStamp."\"" ?>

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://hostingprod.com/js_source/geov2.js"></script>

<script language="javascript"> geovisit();</script>

<noscript><img src=<?php echo $VisitURL ?> border="0" width="1" height="1">

</noscript>

Will I have to add it to every page or just the main page of the store?

[jerseyjoe]

I'll let someone else respond to the issue of where to install that code - but I want to address two issues that are far more important to you in creating and promoting an online store.

1) Simple stats about store activity are available in the CubeCart Admin Control Panel. Look for that link at the foot of the menu.

2) But even that info is not adequate to do the job. Any decent hosting service (NOT Yahoo, for one) will provide you free access to and detailed analysis of the server logs that every web site is required to capture and report. Those data are so rich that studying them can be daunting - but the job is made much easier by what are often called Web Traffic Analysis Tools (WTATs).

Here's links to the home pages of the more popular WTATs. Your host should have them installed for you on your web server and available on demand with a few clicks.

Webalizer

http://webalizer.mirror.camelnetwork.com/

AWSTATS

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

Analog

http://www.analog.cx/

There are others - such as the one that exhaustively analyzes every click of your most recent 300 site visitors.

What you want for informed store management is ALL of the above, not just one or the other. The raw data are the same on every server. But each of those WTATs takes a different approach to presentation of the data. You can get a much clearer understanding of what is happening by using all of them to study your site and plan and monitor the performance of your marketing and promotion.

One reason Google's pay-per-click is eating Yahoo's advertising dollars lunch is that Google bought and re-branded the superb, formerly $895 per-user WTAT, formerly known as Urchin, and they now offer it for free to their advertisers.

There is a free legal version of Urchin5.0 floating around the Internet - and in fact I have it installed on my server through cPanel (*Removed*). My sites can use it without having to be Google advertisers.

Point of all of this is, don't count on Yahoo's spoon-feeding of data to manage your CubeCart. Go shop for a hosting service that provides professional-grade WTATs.

Hope this helps . . .

Edited May 29, 2006 by EverythingWeb

[roban]

You can add that code to your skins/yourskin/styleTemplates/global/index.tpl and cart.tpl just before the last </body> tag.

[Guest marline]

Thank you! I will give it a try!