Is there any way I can track more information about visitors to my Lasso driven site -- in particular, I'd like to see information about each unique visitor -- where they enetered, what site referred them, what pages they browsed...etc?

Please note that the below solution is offered for your use, but digital.forest cannot provide technical support in any manner for the use of the below solution. We encourage you to try it, explore, and make modifications as you see fit.

We've created a small amount of Lasso code you can paste in at the top of all Lasso driven web pages to track this information. In order for these tags to work, the pages must end in the extension .lasso -- index.lasso, for example. We can set the home page for your site to index.lasso instead of index.htm or index.html -- just let us know. You may also have to let us know to enable the file tags on your particular server if a log file is not being created in your directory.

Paste the following in at the top of each document:

When the user first visits the site, a cookie is set containing a SessionID -- a unique random number that identifies a particular customer. That SessionID is written into a text document named "sessions.txt" Along with the session ID, the site that referred the customer (yahoo.com, for example) is also logged.

After that cookie is initally set, each page on the site will log the SessionID as it travels through the site, the date, time, customer's IP address and some other information that can be useful for statistics. This is stored in a text file called sessionlog.txt.

The real value, however,comes when you download them via FTP and import the data into the FileMaker databases we've created -- the data from sessions.txt should be imported into the Sessions database, and the data from sessionlog.txt should be imported into the SessionsLog database using the Import command in FileMaker (select comma delimited and everything should import pefectly). Note that the FileMaker files are available for download in the "Attachments" section below.

You'll then be able to browse through the Sessions database and see the activites of each session in the portal. You can use the data to see how customers spend time at your site, what referrers bring you the most traffic (or the most valuable traffic -- folks who spent time at your site)..etc..

Because the solution works by writing to text files and the analysis is done later on your local computer, t he speed impact from this solution should be pretty minimal -- Lasso is very efficient at writing text and log files.

This kind of tracking is rather common these days and no personal information about the customer is ever divulged, but it's always a good idea to have a privacy policy on your web site and to note somewhere that this tracking is being done.

Download Sessions.fp5

Download SessionLog.fp5