Thread: Adding Sitemeter?

What's the best way to add a site counter to the site? We're trying to convert SiteMeter from an older site to this one and they provided HTML, but I'm not sure where it should be added.

Thanks,
Bill

Counters (eg. this page has be viewed 3852674637243 times) pretty much died 10 years ago. They don't tend to add anything to the site. They *are* useful to admins to somewhat help measure traffic to a given page, but tools like Google Analytics or AWStats (IIS Log Parser) are much much better, provide a huge amount of useful information, and don't cheapen the look/feel of the site. Google Analytics is supported in AspDotNetStorefront out of the box.

If you were going to add it, it would be best added in the template.ascx file I should think. However, I wholly agree with Dans previous statement. It doesn't add a whole lot to the site; I think it lacks that professionalism that people have come to expect from online shopping sites. Enabling Google Analytics is as simple as following the instructions here in our knowledgebase.

Actually, SiteMeter is a tracking product (service) that is similar to Google Analytics. Provides info like what page someone came from, keywords used in the search engine to find you, traffic volume by hour, etc.

Sorry, I should have been more generic in my query. It just has a small amount of code that needs to be added and seemed a little simpler (ie, less I can goof up) that Google's version.

Of course, Google's free........ Maybe that knowledge base article is looking pretty good about now <g>

Thanks for the response!

I updated the template.ascx (FTP'd it to the server), but the new info isn't showing on the site. I assume I have to "restart" it, but I can't locate the web.config file to touch it (and reset the date)...

BTW, I have been running with cashing turned off - if that makes a difference?

template.ascx generally compiles on-the-fly after a change is made, but if you want to try touching the web.config you should find it in the root of your application directory.

Can you provide the snippet of code they suggest placing in your page?

Oops. It was just the home page that didn't seem to be getting the update (I was looking at the copyright comment to see if the update was working). The product pages were all getting done OK...

HOWEVER, come to find out that with a secure (https://) site, when I added their code, anyone going to my site's pages gets the "{Not all elements are secure, do you want to display them anyway}" info dialog box - on every page.

I contacted them to find out they'll have a version that works with secure pages "...in a couple of months..."

Hmmmm... Looks like Google is getting another customer <g>


FYI: Here's the code for the HTML version (there's a java version too):

<a href="http://sm9.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=accountname" target="_top">
<img src="http://sm9.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=accountname" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/></a>

I am not sure I understand their response.

You cannot simply change their urls to use HTTPS?

You can easily add code to detect which protocol the page is using and dynamically generate the urls to use the proper one.

they need to support https invocations. contact them. it's an oversight of many "affiliate" companies and other companies who what you to call scripts from your site, but then fail to understand the need for HTTPS, on their site, which they can solve for a mere $100 for ALL of their customers.

It even took Google a year to do this ()

That is what I do not understand. You can hit the supplied URLs without any query string and get a page response. So they do have SSL working.
I am curious what more they would need to implement?!?

My mistake, sm9.sitemeter.com/stats.asp performs a redirect to www.sitemeter.com/default.asp, which is SSL enabled.
It probably only does this redirect when you do not supply working querystring params...

No, it doesn't work on SSL. I tried this:

https://sm9.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=accountname

and got:

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at sm9.sitemeter.com.

Again the vendor should support HTTPS.