> If you don't mind sharing, I would love to know what kinds of reports you
> getting from the database that are important to you? Nothing can match a
> database for flexibility, but perhaps there is information that you use
> the database to get, that other people also want, which someday could be
> added to Analog.
Ha. I suspect very little of it is generalizable. Well. The first part
starts off with a summary of site-specific "interesting pages" -- this list is
in a quasi-hierarchical form, and includes hits to static pages, total hits to
the machine tool databases, hits by area (the main Techspex area is cobranded
for five other companies, so we do comparative traffic analysis to see whether
their marketing is really buying us anything.) Then we total up
clickthroughs. We analyze how many hits are done by signed-on users as
opposed to anonymous ones. Of signed-on users we check how many are "watched"
users, i.e. not machine tool buyers but rather machine tool distributors or
builders out to scope out their competition.
We do a very detailed report for each advertiser based on the contact
information for each signed-on user (and we *do* ask if that information may
be used in such a manner. Most people allow it, as they're in the market for
machine tools or they wouldn't be visiting the site in the first place.) Same
for clickthroughs.
We do incredibly detailed analysis of number of hits to each advertiser's
vital information, and searches executed on them, and similar but less
detailed analysis of the tools searched for. (Odd. That seems backward but
that's life, I guess.)
Well, enough chit-chat, here's the overview part: (apologies for the format
if you're not viewing in a fixed-width font.) (The modelsearch.bluemarble.net
hits are machine tool "miniwebs" which are hitting the same database but are
somewhat customized and much simplified for inclusion in individual
manufacturer's sites.) This is last week's data (Saturday to Friday.)
Total hits: 27638
www.techspex.com: 24944
modelsearch.bluemarble.net: 2694
Registered (both sites): 15149
Unregistered (both): 12489
Total Techspex: 22579
Home page: 1097
Other files in pages dir: 540
toolcrib.html: 245
Databases and suppliers: 16529
Of which: Techspex proper: 10109
Machine tools online: 465
AMTDA: 5062
EDMTT: 863
M2M: 30
MWD: 0
models.html (MTOOL): 144
Media kit: 11
Link_to: 4210
Top 10 pages: 11
Focus pages: 5
Misc. (info, signons, etc.): 176
Banner displays: Techspex proper: 9748
Mach.tools onl: 81
AMTDA: 2424
EDMTT: 961
M2M: 30
Info requests: 46
Robot hits (to robots.txt): 106
Misc. (modelsearch home, etc.): 103
modelsearch link_to's: 111
Other (miniwebs, client sites,
typos, see list below): 4739
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This *sort* of report I can imagine building into Analog, but it'd be pretty
complicated to define it in general, and certainly difficult to configure with
the existing named-value approach. It might be possible to do something with
a more structured text document external to the .cfg file, a custom report.
Interesting exercise. Who thinks it'd be worthwhile? I might be persuaded to
do something like that in a couple of months.
The rest of the report has some similar interesting bits, but by and large
it's all really detailed analysis that would be overkill to try to
generalize. Much simpler to toss it in the database and do lots of queries on
it. That, of course, would make a lot more sense were we worried about ad-hoc
querying -- but we're not. For a while I was making this available in an
Access database as well, and my customer was hacking around on it, but
basically we took everything he found himself doing, and tossed it in this
weekly report.
I did mention that we run Analog on this data, too, right? For what Analog
does, there's not a lot of point in duplicating it.
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