Track Product Web UI Using Google Analytics

Question

My company creates hardware products that are sold worldwide. They have a built-in web server that allows users to customize the product through a web interface. I wanted to improve the user interface of this interface, and the first step would be to start collecting analytics on how users navigate throughout the tool.

My question is how should I do this because there will be no domain and instead there will be an internal IP address that is used to access the product. For example, if their IT team installs the printer on 10.10.10.10, they almost never associate this with the name of the internal server, and users will gain access to the network configuration tool by directly entering IP. Even if they created the name of the internal server, for example, "config.productname.com", I would not know what it would be.

This means that I cannot create a profile in GA to start accepting this analytic data. Has anyone done something similar in the past or advised how to solve this problem?

Is it possible to solve the problem using SiteCatalyst?

Answer 1

SiteCatalyst provides the ability to store information about visitors in any cookies you choose and does not care about which domain you place the code in. Ultimately, all data is sent to the 2o7.net subdomain, however you can create a CNAME record so that your website stores and records cookies in any domain you choose.

A variable is defined in the s_code.js file that defines the domain in which the cookie is set:

s.trackingServer="yourorganizationname.2o7.net"; 

No matter where this implementation tracked the data, they all would use the same cookie location and be considered the same visitor no matter which domain they were viewing. Just keep in mind that this is defined as a third-party cookie, and a small number of browsers reject third-party cookies by default.

Answer 2

You can try Piwik or Open web analytics , as you can deploy them in your own infrastructure and you can modify them according to your requirements.

If you have a serial number assigned to each device during production, you can use it to distinguish between devices, regardless of which analytics tools you use.

Please note that, as far as I can tell, Google Analytics does not actually care about which domain you host the code on; they simply use your domain specification to determine which sites the tracking files will be sent to. This may not help you, since you probably want the tracking cookies to work, but I point it out if this proves useful ...