跟踪用户 - 自定义PHP / MySQL网站分析

Question

I run a local directory website (think yelp/yell.com etc) and need to provide analytical data to the businesses listed on the site.

I need to track the following:

1) Number of visitors to specific pages (ie: Jim's widgets was viewed 65 times)

2) Number of times a user clicks a link (ie: 25 users clicked to visit your website)

I am able to do this by simply adding one to the relevant number every time an action occurs.

What I would like to be able to do is split this into date ranges, for example, last 30 days, last 12 months, all time.

How do I store this data in the database? I only need the theory, not the code! If someone can explain the best way to store this information, I would be extremely grateful.

For example, do I use one table for dates, one for the pages/links and another for the user data (links clicked/pages visited)? The only solution I have so far is to add a new row to the DB every time one of these actions happens, which isn't going to scale very well.

Thanks to anyone that can help.

Answer 1

I would not reinvent the wheel and use an already available solutions such as Piwik . It can actually read your normal weblogs to provide all the information you asked for.

If for some reason you still need a custom solution, I would not save the tracking data in ranges, but rather use exact time and url-data for each individual page call (what your normal weblog provides). The cumulated data should be generated on-the-fly in your logic section, eg through a SQL-view:

SELECT count(url),url
FROM   calllog
WHERE  calldate > NOW()-30days