How do I Extend Blogengine.Net to collect statistics of visitors?

Question

I love BlogEngine. But from what I can se it does not collect the standard information about the visitors I would like to see (referrer, browser-type and so on).

When I log in as Admin I have a menu item named "Referrer". I can choose a weekday and then I'll be presented with 1 or 2 rows with

"google.com 4 hits, "itmaskinen.se 6 hits" and so on, But that's not what I want to se, I want to se where my visitors come from, country, IP if possible, how many visitors and so on.

If someone of you are familiar with Blogengine.Net and can point me in the right direction to where I would put my own log-code or if you know any visitor-statistic-extension that can do it for me, I would be really happy to know. I prefer an extension, because if I make changes myself to BlogEngine it may break later updates I install.

Blogengine.Net is a blog software made in .Net found here: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/

And yes, I prefer to take this question here rather then in the Blogengine.Net forum, you know why. ;)

(Anyone, feel free to edit my (bad) english in this post and after that delete this sentence)

Answer 1

This isn't an extension, but it's what I use to collect all my blogengine.net data and it should be upgrade safe.

When you log into the Blogengine.NET admin screens you can go to "Settings>Tracking Script", here you can put your http://www.google.com/analytics/ logging script. Google Analytics provides all the referrer, browser type, etc stuff you were wanting. And what's nice is you can then create additional accounts for other sites if you choose.

Answer 2

I use both Google Analytics and StatCounter to track visitor stats. I find that each one provides useful information that the other doesn't. And they're both free to a certain extent.

I place their javascript code int the site.master file of my custom BE.Net skin.

For Google Analytics I go a step further and pass the username of authenticated users as a custom variable. That way I can match users names up with the stats. To do this you can use the _setVar javascript method on the GA pageTracker like so:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-129049-25");
    var userDefinedValue = '<%= System.Web.Security.Membership.GetUser() != null ? System.Web.Security.Membership.GetUser().UserName : "" %>';
    pageTracker._setVar(userDefinedValue);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Answer 3

Anyone noticed that we miss all the hits coming from RSS readers? Syndication.axd does not run the analytics javascripts. So we miss the vast majority of viewers from the statistics. And we happily analyze that is just not impotant - ad-hoc visitors.

Answer 4

For the vast majority of cases, Google Analytics does just fine. It all depends on how much data you want. For example, if you want to keep note of IP addresses and resolve them to get domain names, and also highlight all visits to your blog from, say, your coworkers at the company where you work, you'd have to write some custom code yourself. However, it's all fairly primitive - these sorts of things are easily achievable using ASP.NET.