5 July 2007
Why you should capture IP addresses when tracking visitors
Hello everyone. I hope you all had a tremendous 4th of July… I know I did… relaxed under a tree reading a great book while my daughter played in the waterpark! Simple… yet priceless!I justed wanted to talk for a moment why you should try to capture people’s IP addresses. In the Keyword Radar Reporting area, there is a “Report Options” tab that contains settings for changing the performance of the reporting engine. The only setting there right now is the “ignore duplicate events for same visitor”.
What this means, is that Keyword Radar will automatically filter out “what appears” to be duplicate events by the same visitor. And it uses IP address and other indicators to figure out if a visitor already triggered this event.
For example, Suppose you want to have Keyword Radar report on the sales of your $50 E-book. You would create a project, then edit the sales event in your project and attached a value of $50 to this event. You can do all of this from Step 2 of the Project creation wizard. Then, on your shopping cart thank you page, you would put the Keyword Radar script from Step 3 (with all the sales event tracking values in it) on the thank you page. Then, when this thank you page is viewed, Keyword Radar counts it as a “sale”.
The reason why we added this duplicate filter is because some people may bookmark your Thank you page or refresh the page. You wouldn’t want these duplicate events skewing your sales statistics.
A better practice may be to have a two thank you pages. The first thank you page would have the Keyword Radar sales event script on it. After the page loads, and the sale is recorded, the page is redirected to the second thank you page, which may contain your product download link. Now, if your customer were to bookmark this page, there is no worry about triggering another sales event.
Hope this help,
Brian.
