traffic analysis by Compteur.fr

Using Compteur.fr: How do I ?...

1. How do I exclude my own visits to my site from the stats ?
   
   
2. How do I exclude certain IPs from the stats ?
   
   
3. How do I record my site's referrers ?
   
   
4. Can you tell me who my visitors are ? Can you record their name/address/email/profile ?
   
   
5. How do I download my stats to my computer ?
   
   
6. How do I reset my stats ?
   
   
7. Can I track the downloading of PDF/Music/Video/Image files from my site ?
   
   
8. Can I find out which links people follow when they leave my site ?
   
   
9. My site uses a query string to distinguish between pages. How do I track click-paths ?
   
   
10. Can Compteur.fr detect robots and spiders coming to my site ?
    
    

1. How do I exclude my own visits to my site from the stats ?

   You can easily tell Compteur.fr to ignore your own visits to your site. Simply log into the Control Panel for your account, click on 'Configure', select 'Exclude my own visits > yes' and submit.

   As soon as you do so, visits to your site made with the browser you were using when you set the exclusion will be ignored by Compteur.fr.

   Note:

   • If you use several computers or browsers to access your site, you need to repeat the above for each computer/browser, so that they are all excluded.

   • The exclusion is set by writing a cookie on the computer's hard disk. If your computer's cookies get deleted or reset for any reason, then the exclusion setting will go back to 'Exclude my own visits > no' and will need to be re-adjusted.

   
   

2. How do I exclude certain IPs from the stats ?

   If you use a fixed IP you can tell Compteur.fr to ignore visits to your site by this IP. Simply log into the Control Panel for your account, click on 'Configure', enter the IP to be excluded in the 'IP exclusion' box and submit.

   If you need to exclude a range of IP you can do so by entering the low-end IP, followed by a hyphen, followed by the high-end IP. For example to exclude IP's between 227.234.0.0 and 227.234.69.230 you would enter the following IP exclusion : 227.234.0.0-227.234.69.230

   
   

3. How do I record my site's referrers ?

   There are two types of referrers to your site:

   • Sites that send you traffic without charging a fee (search engines for instance). These sites link to you with a normal HTML link (when you hover the mouse over the link you see your own URL in the browser's status bar)
     
     

     Compteur.fr will automatically detect all referrals generated by these referrers. In the case of search engines, the keywords used are also recorded and you will be able to simulate the exact search that led a given visitor to your site (click on 'Go' in the 'referrer' column of the 'detail of recent visitors' report).

     Note that for the above to work, two conditions must be met:
     
     

     1. You must be using the full version of the Compteur.fr code (the simplified version of the code is not capable of referrer tracking)
        
        
     2. The Compteur.fr code must be installed on your site's entrance pages (the first page that people see when following an outside link to your site)
     
     
     
   • Sites that send you traffic for a fee (pay-per-click search engines, and most sites on which you purchase a banner or an advertisement). These sites link to you with a redirect (when you hover the mouse over your link you don't see your URL in the browser's status bar, instead you see a URL on the advertiser's own site, which then redirects to your URL if you click on the link)

     For this type of referrer, you'll need to make a slight modification to the URL that a visitor is sent to in order for Compteur.fr to correctly detect the referrer. Instead of asking the advertiser to send traffic to www.my_site.com you would ask that the traffic be sent to www.my_site.com?source=referrer_name (replace 'referrer_name' by the name under which you want this particular referrer to appear in your stats). Your visitors will end-up on the exact same page, but Compteur.fr will be able to extract the referrer name from the URL and correctly keep track of where your traffic is coming from.

     More information on the formatting of URLs for precise tracking of your pay-per-click campaigns is available in the referrer and search engine tracking tutorial

   
   

4. Can you tell me who my visitors are ? Can you record their name/address/email/profile ?

   Internet was designed with people's privacy in mind, making it technically impossible to get personal information on your visitors (such as name, email address, profile, etc.) All we can do is detect the IP number and domain name of the server from where the request to your site originated. 99% of the time that request comes from an ISP (i.e. AOL, Compuserve, Earthlink, etc.) and the IP number has been dynamically allocated to the visitor (which means that if the same visitor comes back later he/she will have a different IP number).

   The only case when you can identify a visitor is when he/she is connecting through a private network with a fixed IP number, but this is not a frequent occurrence.

   Note that visitor identification is plain impossible : no one can offer that service so don't waste your time looking for it. Keep in mind that in the end this is a blessing : imagine your mailbox every morning if every site you visited could collect your personal information...

   
   

5. How do I download my stats to my computer ?

   Yes, all your stats can easily be converted into Excel tables which you can then save and manipulate on your own computer. Simply log in to see your stats then click on the 'export stats' link on the top right of the screen

   From the next page click on the category of stats that you wish to export and that's it : an Excel report will automatically appear on your computer.

   
   

6. How do I reset my stats ?

   You can reset your stats entirely by going to the Control Panel for your account, clicking on 'Configure' then on the red 'reset account' link at the very bottom of the page. Be careful with this : once your stats are reset they are gone and can not be recovered (it would be a good idea to download them first and keep a copy on your hard disk for future reference).

   
   

7. Can I track the downloading of PDF/Music/Video/Image files from my site ?

   Yes, you can track the downloading of external files as if they were page views. Instructions are available here

   
   

8. Can I find out which links people follow when they leave my site ?

   If you sell banner ads on your site you may be interested in knowing which banner is the most popular and which links to outside resources are most heavily followed.

   The difficulty is that Compteur.fr can only be installed on your own HTML pages, so it's hard to directly measure the fact that a page outside of your control was opened by one of your visitors. However when that page is accessed through a link on your site, the use of the link can still be measured. Instructions are available here

   
   

9. My site uses a query string to distinguish between pages. How do I track click-paths ?

   By default Compteur.fr will identify a page by using its URL, minus the query string if there is one (the query string is a question mark appended to some URLs, followed by a string of character). If your site is built in such a way that your URLs are differentiated only by their query string, then by default Compteur.fr will identify all your pages by the same name, which can be confusing.

   The solution is simply to 'name' the pages yourself by inserting a custom name in the Compteur.fr code : for details on how to do this please see Can I custom-name my pages in the stats and My pages are generated server-side (ASP, PHP, CGI, etc.) : can I use Compteur.fr.

   
   

10. Can your service detect robots and spiders coming to my site ?

    Compteur.fr only measures 'real' traffic, generated by actual visitors. Robots and spiders are not counted in your stats.