How to track user time on site

You can get the time in next ways:

  1. Once user visit your site, save current time at cookie as "visited", and at next visit you can grab it, if it was set.
  2. And more expensive method: when the page loads, start js timer, and on page unload send to server time which user sent and save it to db.
  3. And if window.unload does not work at Opera, you can send time to server every 5 seconds, and stores it to DB.

If you need, I can write an example script.

UPDATE:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Collect time</title>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        $(function()
        {
            var start = null;
            $(window).load(function(event) {
                start = event.timeStamp;
            });
            $(window).unload(function(event) {
                var time = event.timeStamp - start;
                $.post('/collect-user-time/ajax-backend.php', {time: time});
            })
        });
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>

    </body>
</html>

And backend script: 

<?php 
$time = intval($_POST['time']);
if (!file_exists('data.txt')) {
    file_put_contents('data.txt', $time . "\n");
} else {
    file_put_contents('data.txt', $time . "\n", FILE_APPEND);
}

But as I said it wouldn`t work at Opera browser


Main way I can think of:

When the user first hits a page, you log, say, their IP address, the page loaded, and the time. Then, using some Javascript and AJAX, when they leave the page, you use the unload event to send to an AJAX handler that records the page and when they leave.

You would need to use some sort of ID, apart from a session, to store the page visit. Say I have 5 instances of the homepage open, you'd want to log each one individually. So, something like this:

  1. Access the page, generate a code (let's say page: index.php code: 2345)
  2. Store this in a database table with their IP, and visit time
  3. Unload event fire, call the AJAX, passing the page & code
  4. Look up in the DB for the IP, page, and code, and log the leave time

If they visit index.php again, you would generate another code, say, 36789. Use something that generates a random GUID is best, so you can (essentially) ignore any possibilities of collisions on the same IP/page/code combination.

Tags:

Php

Analytics

Jquery

Codeigniter

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