I started this blog to document 1. What I am working on to improve my skills and 2. Talk about what I have learned.
The last couple days I have been studying how to track users to my site. Usually when I need to learn something, I type in what I want to google and it returns a website, usually stack overflow and I have my answer.
This time I didn't find what I was looking for on the first search. Past experience says that either it's a topic no one cares about or its so simple not too many feel the need to write it down. In this case it appears to be the latter.
When tracking a user, it turns out there really is only three key data points to get from the browser. They are the user's up address, user agent and the last website visited.
These three data points are very valuable. The IP address we can get the visitor's location. This is useful to customize the page or even restrict access to the site.
The user agent provides information on the user's computer hardware, browser, operating system and screen resolution. This allows for better website customization. With this information the visitor isn't forced to view a site made for mobile on their computer or vice versa.
The last website is useful for two reasons. One it is important to know how someone arrived at the site. They can arrived from a site linked to your site, from search engine or enter the address manually. If they enter in the address manually it's a good sign. Either word of mouth is for this site or its a favorite site of the user so they return often. If they arrived from another source then maybe these sites needs to focused on for advertising.
As for where to get these datapoints, it's available JavaScript or server side scripting.
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