How to track activity thru a virtual tour in a clients website?

  • I have an idea to track the activity of a visitor to a virtual tour that will be on a clients web site.

    Each pano should load a unique transparent gif numbered according to the pano.

    Using the crossdomain.xml the unique gifs for each pano would be in a different domain so they can be tracked via the website's log.

    The question is how to load the image (plugin) then remove it , and then reload it again when each pano is visited again while you move thru the tour.

    The images must be reloaded again from the remote domain each time and not use the cache, this way the analysis of the website's log will describe the interest of the visitors in each pano, time spent seeing each one, and the panos that dont get visited.

    How to do it? *confused*

    Any ideas on how to reload the image (from the remote website) every time the pano is requested?

    Any other approach to do the task?

    thanks!

  • thanks panomaster and jpdeglet69!

    The php solution sounds interesting ..but I dont do any php... would love to have the control of the info directly instead of the google analytics even though it looks very interesting.

    The google analytics plugin seems to have some kinks or I don't understand it right... when you put the tracking action on the onclick of a hotspot it seems to respond to the first hotspot but when you go back and try to click on another hotspot it does not report anything....

    Has anybody had the same problem or a solution?

  • It seems like the reason why I thought it was not working right was that the debug mode of the google anylitics plugin does not report the clicks properly....
    and the google analytics site takes time to report... but it IS working.

    But Im only getting reports on the hotspot's onclick="wait(LOAD); call(events.trackthis,/2pathway);"
    and nothing on any of these: *confused*

    <events onxmlcomplete="if(again!=true,delayedcall(15, hideintroimage()); wait(LOAD); call(events.trackthis,/EV_XMLcompl_entrada);"

    <plugin name="googleA" keep="false" onloaded="wait(LOAD); call(events.trackthis,/entrada)" />


    Got it! regarding the plugin ... for the onloaded= to work it needs something to load.... eg ... a transparent gif

    I dont have a clue regarding the events onxmlcomplete= *confused*

  • I have managed to get the google analytics plugin to work ... but what interests me the most is not possible using this because Google's policy is that there is no way to recognize individual info. SO you can't know how a particular visit to your tour went! I dont care who it is... I just want to understand the behavior of the visitors of the tour! if some node does not get visited or which node gets most revisited in a single session.

    I did not know anything on how to program in PHP till a couple of days before , but I did manage to find some free code around the web and installed it in my server. It gives me a log (web server log style) of the IPs and the time that the URL gets requested and it passes a few variables with it , ike the xml where it came from , the object that was clicked , and whatever else I want. Good up to there. *g*

    BUT.... its a plugin calling the url of the php , just if it where an image, and it only gets called once. For example: I go in to the base xml and the plugin gets loaded (and reported on my log system) I click on the arrow to go to the next node , it loads the corresponding xml, and when i go back to the xml it came from, the plugin DOES NOT get reloaded ! the keep true or false does not seem to make a difference!

    HOW can I make a plugin or any other method , load / reload everytime ? I dont want to reload the whole pano, just the specified url!

    Any ideas? is there a reload function i have not found? *confused* *confused* *confused*

    HELP please!

    thanks in advance!

  • Hi,

    Have a look on my attachment.

    Lines 1, 2, 3 are main HTML pages which call basic Java Google Tracker.

    The others are panoramas which call Shanti's krpano plugin tracker.
    - All informations reported are built dynamically : / {tour name}-{language code} / {panorama node}

    thru a typical sequence
    In my main.xml
    ..<tracker
    ......url="analytics.swf?theTrackerCode=..." keep="true"
    ../>

    In each pano.xml:
    ..<events onxmlcomplete="
    ......call(events.trackthis,...);
    ../>

    Each time a user visit a pano, the tracker send informations.
    In a same session, if the user visits twice the same pano, I get "twice" and for me this has a sense.

  • hi jpdeglet69!

    thanks for your answer!

    your comment:

    "In a same session, if the user visits twice the same pano, I get "twice" and for me this has a sense."

    you gather this from the difference between page views ( page vues) and the unique views (consultations uniques) right?

    it has a sense yes, but as you do not have the unique visit trail you cannot know why somebody loaded the xml twice.... did he/she come back thru the same node or did they reload it? or in the case of a button did they click on it ... turn the pano arround and clicked on it again... just as an example....

    I dont care to know from where somebody does something in the tour .... i just want to know what happened in a specific visit! together with the Google analytics info that gives me and my client a clear idea on how to do things better , do you agree?

    Code
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:15:57:58 -0500] "ClientName"- "entrada.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:03:19 -0500] "ClientName"- "entrada.xml"- "flecha2mainview" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:01:06 -0500] "ClientName"- "mainview.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:03:04 -0500] "ClientName"- "pool.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:08:11 -0500] "ClientName"- "entrada.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:13:49 -0500] "ClientName"- "entrada.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:17:28 -0500] "ClientName"- "entrada.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5"
    186.66.XX.XXX - - [21/Jan/2011:16:19:09 -0500] "ClientName"- "entrada.xml"- "did_not_click" "http://Refferer" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13"

    something similar to this is what im getting .... but for it to work properly I need a way to connect to a specific url:

    Code
    <plugin name="stat" keep="true" url="http://server.com/clientsLOG/logwriter.php?site=ClientsName&xml=NodeName.xml&click=NameOfClickPerformed"/>

    every time an action is performed that wants to be tracked the URL must be reloaded and if that happens you can track a local or remote client's server tour activity down to as much detail as you want or need!

    When you don't need the info you just strip the extra code and just use the Google analytics.

    Maybe using a plugin is not the best way to do it? whatever will ALWAYS call the URL will do the trick!

    The other idea that comes to mind is an external plugin done in flash (which i dont know) that does the call to the URL.

    IDEAS *confused* *blink* *unsure*

  • hi jpdeglet69!

    you gather this from the difference between page views ( page vues) and the unique views (consultations uniques) right?

    it has a sense yes, but as you do not have the unique visit trail you cannot know why somebody loaded the xml twice.... did he/she come back thru the same node or did they reload it? or in the case of a button did they click on it ... turn the pano arround and clicked on it again... just as an example....

    I dont care to know from where somebody does something in the tour .... i just want to know what happened in a specific visit! together with the Google analytics info that gives me and my client a clear idea on how to do things better , do you agree?

    Hi,

    In my case, informations gathered by Google Analytics are sufficient *smile* (or too complet *wacko* )

    Example :

    when the tour was "LeCrochetSup.html" was:
    - 6,16% come from another tour "GNouvelleVallon.html"
    - 74,44% go out
    - 25,56% go another tour
    ---- 59,67% go "LesOublis.html"

    And in details

    In my tour "LeCrochetSup.html"
    1st Pano was pano2d0 (entry pano of my tour) :
    - 26,65% go out
    - 73,35% go next :
    ---- 94,89% go pano2d1 (next pano of my tour)

    My initial goal was to know "how many visitors, which tour, how many time by tour..."

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