Comments on: Help me not track my visitors

Question: Help me not track my visitors

Rabulah — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:18:19 -0800

I'm looking for a website visitor tracking service that will allow me to not track users referred from certain domains. Or, one that will allow me to not show those users when I'm viewing the stats.

At the moment, I have a free Statcounter account, with the detailed info from the past 500 visitors. Someone has posted my site to StumbleUpon, which is great, but I've had nearly 300 visitors from StumbleUpon so far today, which is eating up my log really quickly.

I really like being able to see where people are coming from, but with results like I'm getting at the moment, it's hard to see. Is there a service, like Statcounter, that will either allow me to not track users referred from a given website, or one that will allow me to filter a given website from showing up in the log when I view it?

I don't mind paying a small amount per month/year to get this functionality, but free is even better.

By: mincus

mincus — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:24:06 -0800

I think that Google Analytics does this quite well.

It's free and doesn't have any arbitrary limits.

To do what you want in it go to Traffic Sources->Referring Sites and then in the Find Source search either select containing or excluding based on what you are looking for.

By: CollectiveMind

CollectiveMind — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:57:27 -0800

I think a downloadable software called Rapid SMTP might do that for you also, if I'm understanding you correctly.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:22:06 -0800

Um, RapidSMTP bills itself as "high-performance email marketing software." One might read that as software used primarily for the dissemination of spam.

Rabulah: Is this for your self-hosted Wordpress blog? If so, then the Wordpress Stats plugin might help you to see all of your referrers. I'm not familiar with Statcounter... are you able to download raw log files with that service, or are you restricted to viewing the data through their interface?

By: malevolent

malevolent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:45:54 -0800

If you want a quick hack to exclude a few specific referring sites, just insert the Statcounter markup using server-side scripting that checks the referer, e.g. in PHP it might be something like:
if ( (!array_key_exists('HTTP_REFERER', $_SERVER)) || (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'http://stumbleupon.com') !== 0) ) echo 'tracking markup';