im making some statistic codes for my website (im a php developper). I want to calculate how many seconds/minutes the web user stay on any page (like google analytics do) but i have no idea of how to make this. Thanks for any help or scripts!

im making some statistic codes for my website (im a php developper). I want to calculate how many seconds/minutes the web user stay on any page (like google analytics do) but i have no idea of how to make this. Thanks for any help or scripts!

• php
• javascript

5 Answers 5

How are you gathering the data? The mon options would be instrumenting the page using javascript, looking at webserver log files, in the server-side request handler or sniffing the TCP/IP traffic.

Doing it "like Google Analytics" implies the former. In which case the way to do it would be to grab a timestamp as soon as possible when the page loads (rather than waiting for page ready / onload event) and pare that value with the previous tiestamp (so you'd probably store that in a cookie). Then you need some way to send this back serverside, and a way of recording and reporting on the data.

Note that trying to fire an ajax call as the user leaves the page, e.g. via onunload, will not work reliably (the page launching the request is at the end of its lifecycle). The important thing here is the ASYNCHRONOUS part. And making a synchronous call will just have the effect of slowing down the website.

You might want to have a look at Yahoo Boomerang - although it doesn't support dwell time measurements out of the box, it's easy to extend. For a backend, you could do a lot worse than Graphite

You can fire an unload event in javascript when the user leaves the page, which sends an Ajax request to your server. Since this may not work in all browsers, especially if the network latency is high, also have a ping script (also with Ajax) which calls your statistics system once in a while as long as the user stays on the page (for example, every 10-60 seconds depending on the resolution you want).

If you want to do it in serverside i.e in php then probably you would need a table allocated for this. say "analytic"

First you need to add this script in every pages. that inserts these data into the table analytic which is $_SERVER['http_referer'] , current timestamp, remote address and current page URL.

Now the calculation part. basically when a user first lands in your page $_SERVER['http_referer'] wouldnt be from your domain. Then keep the timestamp as the start time.

Now check the next time stamp. If the http_referer is same as previous records page URL then find the difference in the time stamp to know how much the user has stayed in a page.

More or less what am trying to say is find the time between each request from the user.

Disadvantage of this method: When user lands in a page closes it. its impossible to find the time on your site.

A quick and easy method I came up with is pretty useful.

On every page of a site where I want to track time on page, I include a tracker script.

I grab as much info as I can, and make a database entry, including the referrer, the requested/loaded page, user-agent, ip, timestamp, etc.

These timestamps, in conjunction with the user's ip, can be used to determine the time the user was on the previous page (including load time of current page).

The only drawback is that I can't determine time on the last page they visit (which isn't always a bad thing, I can reduce tracking idle time).

Bounces are identified by single entries by a given ip within a specified time period (an hour would probably be sufficient).

At page load create a date object, then when the page unloads create another and substract them. After that you can do an AJAX request to your tracking server, sending the elapsed time.

var startTime = new Date();
var endTime;

window.onunload = function()
{
 endTime = new Date();
 var elapsedSeconds = endTime.getTime() - startTime.getTime();
 //Do the ajax request, sending elapsedSeconds
}