Hi - Well we are really just acting on behalf of the client - that's what they want.

Also its only visitors from that specific website (very close niche) - not just any site

Hi Mat,

A very informative answer.

If someone is going to try and spoof analytics, then would they not also be able to equally try and fool the script?

If someone was to try this do you know how they would likely try and do it - essentially if I know what is likely to be tried, then I can work out something that could counteract it. Are there certain things that can't be fooled, or are very difficult to fool ? - EG things like browser resolution, location etc - or are this just as easy to spoof as anything else?

many thanks

Hi,

We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc.

The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them.

As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent.

The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is

1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it).

2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors).

Many thanks in advance

I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables

There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions".

1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ??

Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions?

2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
/aclk   - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable.

What do I make of this??

Thanks for the help in advance!

PS - I had a look at Mon.itor.us - have you tried their paid service: http://portal.monitis.com/ ??

Hi Rob,

Essentially we have a pretty complex website, with many different sections. This website is constantly being developed so there will probably be code releases for changes maybe 4-5 times per week. Any one of these changes may end up causing an issue with one of the pages (IE page of a specific type) . In addition to this we can get issues with DB or server memory which can occasional cause the website to fail.

All issues are pretty disastrous for business, so what I need to know (or to be more exact our developers need to know) as soon as an issue occurs (most of the attached services will check down all you to set a checking period of say every 5 mins) so it can be fixed (as opposed to waiting for a customer etc to tell us there is a website issue, or manually checking every page type with every code release).

As I say we do have websitepulse at the moment which is great, but also far to complex etc to easy set up and manage, so just doing research around this area, and seeing if anyone has some advice.

Thanks

Doing some digging I found a useful list:

http://mashable.com/2010/04/09/free-uptime-monitoring/

Anyone have any feedback/reviews on these specific tools?

Hi,

I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!).

I need something that will:
1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
2/. Do header status checking
3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
4/. Multiple alert possibilities.

We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case.

Thanks