Looking in the Mirror - Maya in Web Analytics

In a blog post by Michael Brewer of VitalOne Health, a researcher in the health insurance
market, he mentions that ComScore claims that there is a large increase in online searches for Health Insurance.

I'd like to pause for a minute on this topic and reflect on something that was brought to my attention recently, purely opinion of course, some would say backed by sound logic and experience with health insurance online market data. The industry is looking in a mirror, and creating numbers out of that vanity and constant concern about their online presence.

Imagine the amount of people working in Health Insurance every day...sitting at their computers searching for theirs and their competitors websites. Constant queries flying across the internet to see what the next biggest player is doing in order to keep up with the technology.

As technology improves, as web design becomes more creative and standardized, so does the need to keep up with the rest of the web. Companies are learning that to lag behind in online presence is detrimental to their business, but this creates this illusory effect of a growing industry. Its not that the American people are more interested in shopping for Health Insurance online, but American business is more interested in selling Health Insurance online.

Mind you, the market is still great, and very very promising to health insurance companies, both established and new alike. Just don't let these numbers fool you into delusions of grandeur. Non-specific analytics data from an ambiguous web where nothing can be truly tracked with any sort of concrete accuracy is the Maya of technology. The grand illusion that veils the truth and keeps us living in a world that is indeed not as it seems, no matter how hard we believe it to be so.

If you must, take a percentage of that chunk of traffic and consider it the real value of all those searches. What's the magic number (%)? It's ...

The Code Ascetic - SEO Tracking Tool in 6 Lines of Code

I am going to save you all a bunch of headaches and time staring into the sky for the SEO God's to grant you an effective way to track the conversion from traffic to lead. It is as simple as a few lines of PHP code. I am sure there are equivalents in the other server side scripting languages that someone can kindly post in a reply.

Here is the Snippet.

setcookie("referer", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
}
if (is_null($_COOKIE['entrance'])){
setcookie("entrance", $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
}
?>

What does this do? It checks if there is a current cookie for both the website passed Referer value and if there is a landing page value. If not, it grabs the referer from the last website the person has been too (including organic google search) and the page that they landed on, for instance, index.htm or /affordable-health-insurance/ becomes the value of $_COOKIE['entrance']

An easy way to check how your cookies are being set is through this simple PHP Script.

You can save a file as test.php and include only the following code:

print_r($_COOKIE);
?>

This prints the cookies you have set in order. Note: Most Dynamic CMS will already have a bunch of Cookies set that you can take advantage of once you figure out their name value through that smalls cript.

The key to web programming is being able to do the most actions with the least amount of code and processing cycles / memory usage. This is similar to being an code ascetic, the more you can go without will bring you to a state of efficiency not many can achieve.  Keep this method for your records! Keep this ideology in your coding!

Why "GET" can be a problem over "POST"

This has to do purely with browser limitations. I recently encountered a major error using a Dialer management system that uses massive GET requests that fill the header with every parameter.

I tried to create a custom query and save it so that I would be able to use it again. Unfortunatly it would return a error in internet connection page.

I called up the company to find out what was going on. As usual, it is a problem they have never seen before and I was able to create an issue that can be a major problem to them in the future.

The problem was that You can only have up to 2083 characters in the url for IE. I was trying to create a query with about 40 states included as well as other custom fields in their search feature. Knowing this it makes me wonder why even bother with the lack of security of PHP GET over POST. POST is cleaner, easier to manage and limits what the user can do without clear access. This makes for better programming and the necessity to check for problems and redundancies.

The solution is simply resolved by switching to firefox which allows for longer URL Strings in the Header...but their software was "built" for IE. Ah well.