I was wondering what would be the best way to go about storing/tracking user activity on a website. I am thinking of user activity along the lines of which webpage a user visited,how many times has she visited,when(i.e timestamp) of his/her vists.
I am currently thinking of creating multiple tables in my database for each webpage on my website, each of which would track an aspect of user activity on my site. E.g 1 table containing timestamp and userid of each user who visited that webpage, another table storing their actions done on the webpage(e.g liked something)
Would this be a good way of tracking user activity or are there other, better methods of doing so?
PS: Im using PHP and MYSQL for the website, and am doing this as a means of improving my coding so i won’t be using google analytics or anything like it.
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Answer
Yep, store everything in a database. Have a table for user visits, one for user interactions etc.
To start with have a table page_visits that contains an ID for the user (This is your first problem to solve – how to uniquely identify a visitor. Identify them using their IP and or User agent? Create a cookie that refers to a unique ID? There are different methods depending on your goal – none are 100% fool-proof) and the page ID or URL they visited along with a timestamp.
Add a table to track interactions. How you capture the event is up to you, do you fire an AJAX call using Javascript or jQuery to log an event like a click? This table could contain fields such as user_id, timestamp, action_performed, source_page_id.
The way you decide to implement is entirely up to you but a database would probably be the way to go.