A long time ago (I think about 20 years – 2004 or thereabouts) I used a 3rd party piece of Javascript (Sitemeter) for tracking visitor activity on this blog (but not on the main root website which, in those far-off days, was near dormant). I loved Sitemeter, it presented visitor detail in a handy table which displayed summary info. One could click through on table entries to access all manner of information about the visitors in readable (and downloadable) format. Like a lot of tech relationships, it didn’t last. Sitemeter became bloatware. The devs tried to split processing and logging between serverside and clientside which, to the user, gave the mistaken appearance the website was dragging. Like thousands of users I put up with it for too long before eventually consigning it to my personal github bin.
Fast forward a decade or two and we’re in a different world. People who use the internet are now the producers and what we produce is information by the busload. In the post-GDPR world, farming and divining that information has become a dark art for single-landers but the tools exist (I was amazed, even 10 years ago, what a certain energy company could reveal about visitors to its website). Where it gets easy, though, is cross-referencing multi-sites. Tracking a user across 2 websites reveals a lot. Tracking the same user across 3 websites almost reveals their entire Internet history and a bunch of personal information. Assuming each website has its own database, it’s simply a matter of exporting the stats into another database (or even an Excel spreadsheet if one could be bothered with pivot tables) and run cross-comparisons, and Robert would be your Mother’s Brother.
I wouldn’t have the time to do this right now but… a bit of PowerBI across all website databases would be the way to go to produce a drillable front-end to reveal (amongst other things) duration on site (time on/time off), number of visits/day, activities onsite, pages visited, and inbound IP addresses. I like the last one most. It not only reveals a geolocation (if drilled correctly), it also reveals if the user is on a home network, work network (naughty!), or a mobile network. Nah. I just don’t have the time, but the databases are snapped every 24 hours so the records remain for ever. Maybe one day I’ll have the time.
I used to use Google Analytics, because it was easy to set up, it was free and it showed quite a lot of info about your visitors -geolocation was the one I found the most useful but it was also interesting to see which site people had come from to get to mine. It always intrigued me as to how many people actually typed the domain address into Google and then clicked on one of the results. Duh.
But then Google changed it.
It’s still free (I believe) but not so easy to set up… at least I’ve never managed it.
If you know how to do it, lemme know, willya.
And yes, I remember using Sitemeter… waaaay back when.