Re: [Summary-Talk] Tracking PDF downloads

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/11/04 4:33 PM Clement Ross (clement@hexact.net) wrote:

>A client wants to know who, which company in this case, downloaded the
>PDF documents on his site.
>
>Is there a way for Summary Pro to extract that info from the logs?

In general it is only occasionally possible to determine which companies 
access anything at your web site, no matter what tool you use. Access 
from many companies will show up as coming from their ISP, and you won't 
be able to tell which particular client of that ISP is accessing your 
site. Some companies, particularly very large ones, do appear under their 
own name. The rest of this discussion applies only to those companies.

There are two approaches to determine which hosts accessed a particular 
item. You can either create a sub-report that reports on only that one 
file, and then look at the Visitors:Visitors report to see the domain 
names of the machines accessing your site. This requires reprocessing 
your log files, to fill in the new sub-report.

Or you can use the Search Logs feature, in Summary Plus and SP only, to 
search for requests for that document. This is easier to do, but becomes 
impractical if there are a very large total number of accesses to the 
document.

Jason

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Jason@Summary.Net
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Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
  -- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets
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