[Catalyst] Re: Returning to referer - which action to take?

Aristotle Pagaltzis pagaltzis at gmx.de
Sat Oct 2 02:27:21 GMT 2010


* Ekki Plicht (DF4OR) <ep at plicht.de> [2010-10-02 00:15]:
> How would you identify a returning customer (returning within
> a few seconds to a few minutes in one browser session)? Browser
> fingerprinting in an auto action?

For personalisation or analytics?

For personalisation you pretty much have to use a cookie. That
has nothing to do with a session though.

For analytics I would not do this inside the app at all. You can
use referrers to stitch a trail of requests into a click stream.
If you tack a short random sequence of characters onto all your
links as an ignored request parameters, and you follow the trail
backward, you will get near-perfect accuracy for click streams
even for visitors with cookies off, as long as they send referers.
(Many more people block cookies than referers. You can use both
methods of course, possibly using detection to select one.)

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>



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