This document provides instruction for commonly used LevelTen Hit Counter advanced features. If you have any additional question or comments about the LevelTen Hit Counter or Web metrics visit our support forum. Defining Success Pages Virtually every Web site has certain pages that the site owner wants a visitor to hit. For an e-commerce site it may be the purchase page, it may be a sign-up/registration page for others or even a "Contact Us" page for a informational business site. These pages are termed Success pages, in that if a visitor reaches them then the site has successfully accomplished its goal. With the LevelTen Hit Counter you can mark these pages and the software will perform special tracking to classify visits as successful or non-successful. This is very similar to how visits are classified as bounces and conversions. The difference with success pages is that you can define which pages you want tracked as success pages. Once you have identified a page or set of pages all you have to do is set the "success=0" variable near the top of the page tracking code tag to "success=1" on that page. It will now be tracked as a success page. Custom Referrers Hit counters can naturally only track referrers that come from a hyperlink on another Web site. This includes both regular hyperlinks and search engine queries. However, it does not include many other types of links such as those in E-Mails, word processing documents, PDFs and multimedia presentations. Additionally when a person types a URL Web address into their browser a standard hit counter can not log a referrer.
The LevelTen Hit Counter does allow you to setup custom referrers that can track virtually any type of referrer and marketing campaign from E-Mails and Pay-Per-Click search engines to off-line promotions such as direct mail, telemarketing, and mass media. While custom referrers are not perfect for all applications, with a little creativity they can be highly effective in evaluating the ROI of promotional campaigns.
The LevelTen Hit Counter supports two methods of creating a custom referrer, query strings and target pages. A query string custom referrer is created by adding a key/value pair to the URL that is referring your site. For example, in an E-Mail announcing a special promotion instead placing a standard hyperlink to your site such as "http://www.mydomain.com" you add a key/value query string such as "http://www.mydomain.com?HcR=email001". Both of these links will go to the index page of mydomain.com, only the one with the "?HcR=email001" will be logged as the custom referrer "email001" in the hit counter.
The second way to create a custom referrer is to use a target page. A target page is just a special entry page for your site to which a specific marketing campaign links. Using the above special promotion E-Mail example you would create a new page on your site called specialpromo.html (you can call it whatever you like). It may have special content for the promotion or be an exact copy of another page on your site. What is important is the page is not linked from the main site or elsewhere on the Internet, only those receiving the E-Mail would be link to the page. When you send the E-Mail the response hyperlink would be "http://www.mydomain.com/specialpromo.html". What is also important is to let the hit counter know to track referrers to this page differently. You do this by setting the "cRef" variable in the page tracking code. By default this variable is set to nothing, e.g. ''. If you place a value in the variable then the standard referrer is ignored and the cRef referrer is logged.
One more option is available to you with custom referrers. You can also create a custom referrer type to work in conjunction with standard or custom referrers. Using the query string method you can create a referrer type adding "HcT=referrerType" to the URL. The above E-Mail example would become "http://www.mydomain.com?HcR=email001&HcT=email". Thus both a custom referrer of "email001" and a referrer type of "E-Mail" is logged. Using the target page method you use the cRefType variable in the HTML tag to set the referrer type. You can use either the custom referrer or referrer type or both at one time.
Flash and Event Tracking With the LevelTen Hit Counter you can track navigation within Macromedia Flash and track custom event such as file downloads. Tracking both Flash and events use basically the same technique.
First you must generate the Flash/Event codes by clicking the button under tracking codes on the options tab in the Reporter. You will need to put the JavaScript header code into the header section, e.g. between the <head> and </head> tags, of your HTML page that is related to the event or has the Flash swf file embedded into it. This creates the HCEvent function which logs the event with the LevelTen Hit Counter. To call the HCEvent you will use the other two codes on the Flash/Event Code page.
The HCEvent function takes two parameters the first being the name you want to give the event, in quotes, and the second is the success flag. If the success flag is set as 0, the default, it tracks as a normal event, if set to 1 the event is tracked as a success event. For a discussion of success pages/events see Defining Success Pages above.
Tracking Flash The Flash ActionScript Event Call is an ActionScript function that calls the HCEvent function. It can be added to any ActionScript event to create an entry to be logged by the LevelTen Hit Counter.
For example, if you have a four area Flash site with a button to enter each area we could track the visitor navigation by adding the following to the button instance:
on (release) {
getURL("javascript:HCEvent('home',0)","_self");
}
For the other areas of the site you would just replace 'home' with the other area names for their corresponding buttons. For the contact area you may want to change the success flag to 1 since if someone finds your site interesting enough to contact you, that might be considered a success.
Note, even if your entire site is Flash you will still want to use the Page Tracking Code on the HTML page in which the Flash is embedded to log referrer and other visitor information.
Event Tracking You can track any event that you can trigger with JavaScript. One of the most typical events someone might want to track is a file download, such as a zip file download. Standard hit counters cannot track a file download because the download is not a HTML page that can have a page tracking code embedded in it. The LevelTen Hit Counter can track the download by using the event tracking code.
All you need to track an event is to call the JavaScript header function embedded on the page that causes the event. Use the 'HTML JavaScript Event Call' to log the event. For example, if you have a hyperlink to download a zip file, add to the <a href...> anchor tag the JavaScript onClick event with the HCEvent call code. For example: