westworld

Companys put a lot of time and effort in creating compelling websites. Tons of resources are spend to ensure sites add to sales. But is all this money well spend? Thats what analytics software should clarify. Tools like Google Analytics, AWstats,… give a wide overview of visitors, time on site, conversions and other usefull information. But what if this is not enough? What if you want to target your visitors in a more personal way. What follows are some of the options that I found and that could help you change your content on a page per page level.

GeoIP:
This tool allows you to check the visitors ip adres and make an estimated guess as to where he/she is from. Maxmind offers a free and a licensed version for GeoIP Country and GeoIP City.
I tried out the free version and it gave me:

• country code
• city
• Postal code
• latitude – longitude

Device

Handsetdetection.com has a big list of hardware it can detect. Even Kindle 2 is included.

PHP

With php you have a few tools to analyse your visitors. Just like GeoIP, you cannot be 100% sure. Some of the data that gets send to the server can be manipulated. Here are some of the things that I use.

$_SERVER referer. What is the page that the visitor was on before he came to the current.
get_browser A php function that uses an ini file to detect browserinfo.

CSS, HTML and Javascript

• css history: a css-javascript trick to check visited sites from a list. This is a very old bug but noone seems to be fixing it. Spajax is a good example of this. [Blackhat]
• conditional comments Test if a visitor uses Internet Explorer, Microsoft office [*]
• estimate gender: build ontop of the css history hack. Script to guess visitors gender.
• socialhistory: uses the css history hack to track your bookmark sites.
• privacy leaks
  
• Amazon wishlist
• detect private browsing
• clickjacking [this is pure evil and should not be used in marketing, yuk]