"Easiest" way to track unique visitors to a page, in real time?

Question

I need to record in "real time" (perhaps no more than 5 minute delay?) how many unique visitors a given page on my website has had in a given time period. I seek an "easy" way to do this. Preferably the results would be available via a database query.

Two things I've tried that failed (so far):

Google Analytics: Does the tracking/reporting, but not in real time - results are delayed by hours.

Mint Analytics ( http://www.haveamint.com/ ): Tracks in real time, but seems to aggregate data in a way that prevents reporting of unique visitors to a single page over an arbitrary time frame.

So, does anyone know how to make Mint Analytics do what I want, or can anyone recommend an analytics package or programmed approach that will do what I need?

Answer 1

Google AppEngine is cheap and plentiful (you get 10instances for free): write yourself a small tracking script.

Answer 2

You could always set up a table and script to log whenever someone hits pages you want to track. With this solution you can query on demand and get immediate real time results. This solution also allows you to datamine the logs in various ways. Note, if you have a really high volume site, you may want to choose an alternative solution.

-Jay

Answer 3

You can create a script that gives the user a cookie with a unique ID, and then update a database table every time the user returns, or insert a record for new users. That would be the easiest way.

Another way would involve parsing the server logs every 5 minutes.

Answer 4

If you run this website on a UNIX server, then you can have a program that "tail"s the log files in order to keep up to the second statistics. This data can then be exported to a web page every minute or whatever time granularity you would like. Since you will be writing the program that follows the log entries you can arrange for it to ignore accesses to pages that don't belong to the site, such as your stats page.

This should work for even a high-volume site as long as you don't set the output granularity too small. Alternatively, assuming that you write the program in a high-level language like Python, it is not much extra effort to make the program into a web server on another port, and just save the stats in RAM until you want to query them. Check this blog entry to see how simple it is to add web server funtionality to a Python application using the Twisted module.

http://jcalderone.livejournal.com/#post-jcalderone-47954

Answer 5

You can try Woopra http://www.woopra.com/ , It is really simple, just put a provided javascript in your site and download the program and thats all. you will get real time data about your visitors presented in an awesome way. But i dont know if it is still free.

Answer 6

Shameless plug: You can try http://www.picnet.com.au/MET/ you can also read my blog post on this product here: http://www.picnet.com.au/blogs/Guido/post/2010/01/27/PicNet-Mouse-Eye-Tracking-Service-Limited-Release.aspx

This product actually lets you replay the user interactions on your web site and its free.

Answer 7

Tracking visitors who frequent your site has been very important for me as a businessman because I need to know who my audience is. I have used Google Analytics but I wasn't happy with the results because they were too limited so I switched to http://www.leadsexplorer.com to get more than the usual tracking report. I don't know much about scripting, which is why the service is more convenient, in my opinion. I wouldn't have to worry about error codes or wrong coding parameters. This is really helpful if you know little about programming, such as myself. Hope this helps!