[WEB4LIB] tracking clickthroughs

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

Bob Long wrote:

> Is anyone tracking the clickthroughs on links that are offered from your
> library's site? If so, is there a particular piece of software that you use
> and like? Did you write a script of your own to do this?

Although you seem interested in clickthroughs to external links, you may
find the following information (on internal clicktrails) to be useful.

We occasionally enable user tracking on our website.  The data generally
gets used as follows:  We put up an interactive form that lets staff mem-
bers enter a URL and get a report of how every user within the last 24 (or
however many we determine) hours got to that URL.

We also add a conditional footer to some internal pages (i.e., one that
only shows up if you're on our local network) that lets staff find out,
with a single click, how people are getting to the page being viewed. I.e.,
it displays a series of user sessions in which users looked at the page
being viewed at least once.

Facilities of this sort add overhead, and require that we use cookies with
fairly short expiration times.  So we only enable them for short spells.

But doing this doesn't require changing any URLs.

We're running Apache under Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6, as well as on a number
of Linux-based servers.

-- 

Richard Goerwitz
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