Track individual users?

I’m working on a public university’s website. They’d like to track users to see how well their website is performing, as well as see the actions of individual users. The users will show up from an opt-in mail to a specific group, such as scholarship applicants.

I’m not sure how to go about it, but it seems to me the best way is to set a cookie at a a landing page such as www. website .com/MarySmith12. Then from there track the user (Mary) through the site - hopefully without requiring the use of custom URLs.

They would like to be able to track Mary’s actions (does she apply, investigate a major, etc.?) as well as aggregate groups of users like Mary.

Is there a way to get this data from Piwik, perhaps by saving the user ID in some data field, appended to the url, or even the action name/title?

All I really understand is how to track individual pages, not individual users, but there should be a way.

Do you mean knowing a visitor path ?

Like on the following mockup ?

http:/ /synaptique.ca/visitpathinfo/pathinfo.htm

(Remove the space between / / ).

[quote=TulipVorlax @ May 25 2010, 07:46 AM]Do you mean knowing a visitor path ?

Like on the following mockup ?[/quote]

I saw that before and I like it. It would be nice.

However, I don’t need to track visitors between pages. I just want to track where they’ve been - which pages were visited.

I did see the discussion about your idea. I think it was noted as not being possible with the current data because referrer data isn’t stored. The referrer date may not be needed - you can pretty much go by timestamps. If a visitor leaves one page and later shows up on another, you can assume the previous page referred the visitor. This can be made even more accurate by looking at time spent on the page - if one page is loaded within seconds of leaving another, it’s fair to assume it was reached using a link.

Of course, it would be more accurate to track referrers, but not by much.

It seems to me that all we really need to solve my problem and yours is a way to track individual users as they visit the site.

My mistake - the referrer does need to be tracked - I was thinking of something else.

However wouldn’t it be possible to track the referrer (Google “best lure”) as part of the page name or by appending something to the url field? That would serve the purpose of marking the data we need.