Web Page Visit Notification Script
http://www.danifer.com/web_page_notification_script.php
On the back of my business cards, I include a URL that users can visit to view special offers, get discounts on my services, and basically just get cool extra stuff for free. The idea is to gauge who is actioning on my business cards when I give them out – meaning I want to know if people are taking the time to look them over, absorb the information and bothering to visit the website.
Basically, I created a new page on my site and included the noindex, nofollow metatags so it wouldn’t get spidered by the search engines. I don’t link to it from any other pages on my site, so the only way to get to it is to manually type the URL into your browser. On this special page I included a script that sends a quick email notification to me whenever it is loaded in a browser. Basically, an email notification of web visit. The email it sends looks something like this and can be easily customized for a variety of applications:
A request has been made to your specified web page.
Site Visited: http://www.danifer.com
Viewed Page: http://www.danifer.com/secretpage
IP Address: http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=an IP Address
Referrer:
User Agent: Useragent info here
Time: October 18, 2006, 7:26 pm
Of course you can always get this information from your log files, but I don’t know anyone who has time to read those everyday, and I wouldn’t expect someone outside of my field to know where to find them. I’m billing this more as a low tech tool for clients to get real-time feedback from their website in an email format that most of them are comfortable using.
This was a pretty simple tool to setup and I’ll be pitching it to clients as a good way to feel out some of their marketing efforts. Since the script can be shared via a php include statement and includes custom page/site info for each page visit notification, it’s easy to host the script in a single location and call it to wherever it is needed, so use on more than one page is very simple.
I’d like to see clients use this to judge the effectiveness of things like bulk mailings, word of mouth advertising, TV commercial spots, and other offline and online marketing efforts.