Marking
Marks
The Marking system allows you to mark visits by specified criteria. Then you can
filter your reports by these marks or you can attend to only the visits
marked with some "special" marks.
In this menu you can define all possible marks you need with an ability to edit
and delete them. However, you won't be able to delete marks referred
to by other records in the database from here.
These are the marks we have defined for our sample sites:
Marking Rules
Marking rules are used by a 'daily' task that is supposed to mark visits.
To define a marking rule, press the "Add" button and then specify a mark
with at least one condition.
The conditions available are:
- "Count of visited resources" condition (means count of resources requested per
visit: pages, downloads, etc).
- "Visit duration" condition (time in seconds between access to the
first and the last resource. If during a visit only one resource was
accessed, the time will equal to 0 sec.)
| |
You should specify an arithmetic condition with one or more
values for these two types of conditions. For the "between"
and "outside" conditions use both input lines to enter
integers. |
- "Pages" condition. (Here you can specify a list of regular perl expressions
as patterns with a condition. This condition will be applied to pages,
downloads, links, 404-URLs and action names. The "Check" button
allows you to verify syntaxes of an entered pattern).
- "Referrer" condition. (Here you can also specify a list of
perl regular expressions as patterns with a condition.
This condition will be applied to a referral host and a referring
page and query string. E.g., if a visit came from the
www.altavista.com?q=software+development, this string will be assessed
by this "Referrer" condition. The "Check" button allows you to verify
syntaxes of an entered pattern)
- "Actions" condition. (Here you can specify a list of action sub-conditions
with a main condition. Numbers in sub-conditions represent the count
the action occurrence).
For example, as shown above, we have created a rule to mark as
"Potential client" all visits that:
| a) | originated from the referring page
containing the text "software development company" or "custom web
development", etc.; |
| b) | visited the "contacts.php" page; and |
| c) | accessed more than 3 pages of the site. |
Marking rules as well as other rules reviewed (parameter, access) start
from the first one unless matches are found. Of course, some marks in
your marking system have a higher priority over the others, so you
must arrange rules in a proper order.
As an example, look at the rules we have defined for the
"Time-Assistant support site" (ID=2).
Mark as
| "Accidental" | IF some of these only (or only) resources: /about\.php/i,/index.php/i (almost no interest for us) |
| "Purchase" | IF some of these (or) resources: /purchase.*?thankyou/i (user gets to the 'thankyou' page upon purchase) |
| "Quote" | IF some of these (or) resources: /product.*?thankyou/i |
| "Visited payment link" | IF some of these (or) resources: /link:.*?pay.*?\.com/i |
| "Interested in our company" | IF all of these (and) resources: /link:.*?softerra\.com/i (they might eventually become our clients) |
| "Feed Back" | IF all of this and more (and+) resources: /feedback.*?thankyou/i |
| "New user" | IF all of these (and) resources: /signupok/i (new users of our online application) |
| "User" | IF all of these (and) resources: /link:.*?hlogin\.php/i (Old user visits to work with the online application) |
| "Accidental" | IF pages count < 3 (if a visit has not satisfied any of the above conditions and accessed less than 3 pages - no interest for us as well) |
| "Interested in product" | IF pages count > 0 (All other visits - user accessing many product pages) |
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When you define your marking rules, you have to deal with different kinds
of conditions. Conditions applied to pattern lists (like the 'Pages'
condition) or sub conditions may cause some misunderstanding, so let's describe them.
| "some of these (or)" | - condition will return TRUE if one or more defined patterns match some of the visited resources |
| "some of these only (or only)" | - TRUE if one or more defined patterns match all of the visited resources |
| "all of these (and)" | - TRUE if all defined patterns match visited resources (one or more or all - doesn't matter) |
| "all of these and more (and+)" | - TRUE if all defined patterns match visited resources but not all resources |
| "exact all of these" | - TRUE if all defined patterns match all visited resources |
| "none of these" | - TRUE if no defined patterns match any of the visited resources |
The marking of visits is performed by the cron/jobs.php script.
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