MatrixStats - professional statistic reports - monitoring visitors of your website

MatrixStats Admin Menu

Users

From the users admin page, an administrator can:
* Add, remove, and change the passwords and usernames of users with access to the site.
* Use the permissions table to control access to reports by user. The ‘Anonymous’ user represents all visitors who wish to view stats from the site, but do not have a username or password.
* Set an e-mail address and the types of summary that each user wishes to receive in their e-mail.

Watches

The watches administration section defines watch reports. These can be viewed from Tracking->Watches. Totals, graphs and logs can be displayed for all watches.

URL Watches: A URL watch will provide detailed logging for the visitors to pages specified by the Wildcard field in the URL Watches table (‘*’ and ‘?’ are valid wildcard characters).

For example, if a detailed log of visitors accessing the index page of a web site should be required, a row should be added as such:

Where ‘index.htm’ or ‘index.html’ is the default page in the web site.

IMPORTANT: URL Watches can only be applied to recognised file types. If a watch is required on a non-recognised file type (i.e. not in either the page or download file extensions) then the file extension must be added to one of these lists (Admin->File Extensions).

IP Watches: An IP watch will provide detailed logging for the visitors to the site with the specified IP address.

For example, if a detailed log of visitors accessing the site from 10.10.10.* (maybe the corporate cat-C network) should be required, a row should be added as such:

The wildcard * matches any byte value. Unlike the page wildcards for URL watches, the IP wildcard * can only be placed at the end of the IP address, or not at all. If ‘Log’ is unchecked, a record of sessions from the specified IP is kept, but not per-hit information.

Link Watches: MatrixStats can be configured to ‘watch’ for visitors who follow links both into and out of the site. This can be immensely useful to those who sell advertising, as every click from an advert (a specific link) can be counted both into and out of the site.

In the following example, a link to a shareware page (shareware.html) is given a watch.

The Key (18332-1) is a unique identifier to indicate to MatrixStats which link is being requested. Links should be constructed as follows:

http://matrixstats/click?key

Where matrixstats is substituted for the host and, optionally, the port of the statistics server, and key is substituted for the value shown in the above table. Examples:

http://matrixstats.example.com/click?18332-1
http://1.2.3.4:8000/click?18332-1

Any visitor following a click-watch link will be referred automatically to the specified destination URL, and will be logged by MatrixStats.

Page Groups

Page groups are used in MatrixStats to define distinct areas of the site. These can be used to build up a site map. Each page group is defined optionally by a set of wildcards to match requests for files. Many separate maps can be made using this mechanism.

The following site map (as shown in Admin->Page Groups) is an example breaking down fictional sales content of a web site. The page group mechanism is best explained with a short example. This example is a fictional site that sells gardening products and spacecraft.

A single page group can be added with the ‘Add Group’ form at the bottom of the Page Groups Administration. The first group added in this example is a group representing gardening products. All pages within the gardening directory of the site are categorised as sales-related gardening product and so the wildcard /gardening/* is used. The title and colour chosen are arbitrary, but should be representative of the group. Parent is not applicable yet, so a value of ‘None’ is chosen.

Having clicked ‘Add’, a single page group should appear above the ‘Add Group’ form with the selected colour and title:

The two icons in the top right of the group are for editing the group or deleting it, respectively. Clicking edit loads a form very similar to the ‘Add Group’ form already used, in order to change a group’s title, colour, parent or filters.

In this fictional example, there are some categories of gardening which exist outside of the /gardening/ directory of the site. One example of this is a Plants group, which is, curiously enough, in a /plants/ directory. This is added in the same way as the Gardening group, leading to a second page group being displayed separately from the Gardening group. Now, as Plants are a sub-category of gardening sales, all sessions matching ‘Plants’ should also be included in the totals for Gardening. This could be achieved in a couple of ways. The wildcard that matches Plant pages (/plants/*) could also be included in the Filters for Gardening. Alternatively, the Plant page group could be made a child of Gardening. In this way, any sessions which visit pages in the Plant page group would automatically be added to the Gardening group. In order to make this happen, the ‘Parent’ of Plants has to be set to Gardening, leaving the site map looking like this:

If this map is now related to how the real site map will look, then the behaviour should become clear. In a short period of time, the site is visited by two sessions. The first session looks at many pages, but none in the /plants directory. It does, however, look at /gardening/gadgets/superweeder.htm and so is placed within the Gardening group, but not Plants. A second session looks only at /plants/potted/geranium.htm but because Plants is a child of Gardening, the session is placed within both. So, after these two sessions have ended (assuming these were the only two in the time frame reported), the site map (Pages->Map) would look as follows:

The rest of the map is built up in the same way, with the map growing more specialized and granular towards to bottom. Page groups need not have any filters of their own, as they can be used solely to group together the sessions of their children (as with the sales group in the completed example below):

To summarise: The site map is a session-based statistical tool. Sessions are placed into page groups when they match one of a group’s wildcards. When a session is included in a particular group (for example the ‘Tools’ group), then it is implicitly included in its parent (e.g. the Gardening, and subsequently the Products group).

The Map builds up a picture of the site according to areas visited by each session. If the percentage displayed by a group is 100% then every session during the specified time range has visited areas of the site defined by group’s wildcards, or one of the groups’ children’s. The percentage is also represented as a pie chart in the top-left hand corner of each page group. The average shown in each group is the average number of sessions per day that have fallen into that group’s criteria.

File Extensions

MatrixStats does not ‘automatically’ know what a ‘page’ or ‘download’ is, and thus build up statistics on those criteria. Files are defined as page, download or ‘other’ by virtue of their file extension (the portion of a filename after the last ‘.’).

Defined file extensions can be ended with the ‘*’ wildcard, but no other wildcard combinations are recognised.

By default, page file extensions include .htm* to match all HTML documents, and .asp to match active server page documents. Downloads include common video and compressed file formats such as .zip and .avi.

File extensions should be added or altered to cater for all page and download files on the site.

Dynamic Pages

A large number of websites are generated dynamically (i.e. the pages are not simply read from files, they are ‘processed’ first, to display content from databases for example). Often the entire website is made up through a single cgi application, and, as such, every request to the site appears as the same file.

The function of a cgi application depends on a set of parameters passed to it. The parameters are separated by ampersands (‘&’) and are begun after a question mark; for example:

http://www.myexample.com/index.pl?page=entry&something=1

In this example, the page is index.pl (a Perl script), and the parameters are “page” and “something” which have values of “entry” and “1” respectively. These parameters can then be read by the script index.pl, and according action can be taken to construct a page to send back to the visitor. In this example, to avoid index.pl appearing as every page hit, the ‘page’ parameter is added to the ‘dynamic page’ list.

Subsequent requests to /index.pl will be recorded alongside the ‘page’ parameter (and it’s value). This may lead to the following pages appearing in reports:

Instead of the same set of hits, without the dynamic page entry:

If more than one parameter defines which ‘page’ is displayed, then comma-separate the parameter names in the ‘Key Query Fields’ field. For example:

Filters

Filters allow some degree of content management. Filters can be set up for both page requests, and referrers, to either exclude matching statistics, or to rename/group them differently.

An example of a referrer filter may be to group requests from another site excluding the 'dynamic' part of the URL:

Referrer............................................................... Total
http://www.x.com/s.asp?product_id=1-112342 ..................22
http://www.x.com/s.asp?product_id=1-12233&date=now .....18

With the addition of a referrer filter as such:

Wildcard ........................Replace
http://www.x.com/s.asp* ...http://www.x.com/s.asp [filtered]

The results become:

Referrer ..................................Total
http://www.x.com/s.asp [filtered] .....40

Which in turn leaves more room for other referrers in the report, but does not exclude important information

Site Settings

Site settings allow alteration of the following parameters. Please note that changes made to the aliases and timezone will NOT be applied historically.

* Aliases : Every host name that resolves to the web site (must include the main site name). One host name per line e.g.
mysite.com
www.mysite.com
* Max. Results : The maximum number of results to display in tables for reports in all sections.
* Timezone : The timezone to display the site's statistics in.
* Display 2D Charts : Check this option to display 2-dimensional charts instead of the usual 3D for both pie and bar charts in all report sections.