Would you like to get to know the visitors to your website? Interaction tracks individual visitors as they move from page to page. It maintains detailed information about visitors as they browse. Learn who is visiting your site and what they are doing.
Because Interaction tracks individual visits, it knows who is visiting your site at any time. This information is available for the webmaster in real time, and may even be shared with the visitors. For example, there are currently 51 visitors at this site, with 2 right here. Letting visitors know who else is around will make your website a social place. Interaction's Visitors dialog lists all current visitors for the webmaster:
The Visitors dialog has a row for each visitor. The two first visitors in the list above are members of the site. The "faceless" guest is a visitor without membership. Each visitor is listed with their hostname and the time they arrived the site. The dialog shows the delay since their last hit and how many pages they have visited. The last column in the table shows the URL for the current location of the visitor, so that the webmaster can see where everybody is at all times.
Interaction gathers information about the visitor for the duration of their stay. It knows where the visitor came from, even after the visitor has been at your site for a while. Interaction also keeps track of which pages the visitor has browsed. Such information (often called persistent state) can be used to personalize the presentation of the site based on the activities of the visitor.
Interaction allows the webmaster to inspect any visitor to get more details. The Visitor Inspector provides detailed information about an individual visitor and his activities at your site:
The information in the dialog includes the visitors name, nickname, username (for members), email address, which browser he is using, the domain name and IP number, the URL for where the visitor came from before visiting your site, and a list of the languages with which the visitor is familiar. On the right side you can see a list of all pages visited during the stay. so you can follow the visitors track through your site.
Interaction can maintain additional information about each visitor. This information is found in the properties list. Some of the properties can be opened to view their contents. Properties are used to maintain persistent state, which is very useful for advanced features. For example, the Shop Service of Interaction adds a shopping cart as a property to each visitor.
Interaction maintains a list of recent visits, so you can at any time learn about who has been visiting your website. The Recent Visits dialog answers important questions such as how many pages each visitor has browsed or the locations where visitors exited your site. Such information is important for improving your pages to increase length of stay or site usability.
Interaction tracks visitors in the most reliable manner, without requiring logins or markup changes. The tracking even works if the visitor has disabled cookies, and won't confuse visitors coming from the same host or proxy.
The visitor tracking mechanism of Interaction combines several techniques for the most reliable tracking. Interaction automatically adds a unique identificator to all links when this improves trackability. It never confuses two visitors, which is crucial for shopping carts and to maintain privacy. In contrast to most other web software with persistent state or shopping carts, Interaction figures out by itself where to add tracking codes instead of requiring manual modifications to the markup.
in·Progress pioneered the technique of tracking visitors as they browse from page to page on the web. We implemented tracking based on unique id in the URL as early as in 1994, and applied it to the initial versions of Interaction in 1995. The same technique has later been used in most high-end web server software that depend on persistent state.