Incident Report on 05.02.2024

On 5th February 2024 13:54 UTC, one of our core database storage devices started to fail. It created a chain of events to occur within Hitsteps products. Failover database servers could not handle the load on their own, which has caused the following impacts:

  • Slow loading of the pages
    The dashboard took longer than usual to open and show the data
  • Inability to track every page view due to slower processing speed, some data in the queue were expired
  • Unbalanced distribution of traffic in our load balancers
    Due to a lack of storage device functionality in core database servers, the load balancer sent traffic to a few leftover failover servers that were not ready for the load.
  • Crash of visitor attribution engine
    To detect visitor information, we depend on lookups to internal database engines. In this period we were unable to detect and store new visitor attributions (geographic, browser, loyalty, …) resulting in those fields to be empty in visitor reports.

We strive to provide accurate real-time analytics to our customers, however, this issue caused a few hours of statistics to be unreliable on 05.02.2024.

The root cause was detected and a solution was implemented in less than 2 hours. It took a few additional hours until the processing queues and visitor detection engine were back to normal.

To compensate lack of accuracy that happened on 05.02.2024 between 13:54 UTC to 17:30 UCT, we have decided to offer a week of free licenses to all of our paid customers. Your current subscription will happen as usual and the additional license will activate automatically toward the end of your billing subscription (i.e. when the subscription is expired, canceled, or updated).

Hitsteps Web analytics is now available for Joomla 4

There was a lot of breaking changes in the Joomla 4 release making Hitsteps no longer run on it.

One of the challenges for us is to provide a single installation file that supports both Joomla 2 and 3. Now we are focusing on Joomla 4. and we have made it so that the plugin is compatible with all 3 versions of Joomla.

You may download the fresh release of the Hitsteps plugin for Joomla from our download page and enjoy watching your visitor’s steps in your updated Joomla CMS.

 

 

Managing Your Web Team Through Change

Change can impact any business function at pretty much any time however, there are some functions that are more exposed or susceptible to change due to the nature of the work they conduct.

The functions that are most likely to experience change regularly are generally IT, e-commerce and marketing teams. Because technology moves so quickly changes in the market place are common and can have a big impact on websites in the form of security updates and data protection as well as marketing platforms with algorithm changes and new digital marketing channels. 

Managing change within a business usually falls to managers. Common examples of change may include a business take over, a new management team coming in and new processes or technology being implemented into the business.

Resistance to Change 

It’s not uncommon for employees to be resistant to change, even if it’s likely to benefit them in the long run. People who have grown accustomed to existing processes or technology will resist until the last minute by not installing updates or switching to new systems. Some ways to manage change

include: 

• Forming a leadership team
• Creating a feedback loop
• Being clear when communicating changes and emphasizing the benefits to the employee

Creating a Change Management Plan

There are a number of frameworks you can use to create a change management plan as well as software solutions, including the Inpulse change management plan

Regardless of the framework or software, there are some key principles of change management that you need to include in any change management plan. These include;

• Setting objectives
Being clear about the objectives and the outcomes of the plan is important because it will help you to analyze the areas in which you were successful. SMART objectives are often used to create realistic and measurable goals.

Steps to help make the change
Change doesn’t happen all at once, so setting out bite-sized steps that will help you achieve your objectives is a much better way of creating a clear and manageable process so it doesn’t feel too overwhelming. It will also make it easier to get buy-in.

Implementation and timeline
Defining who will be doing what and by when helps to keep all stakeholders accountable and is an important metric to track. Some changes, like moving a website to a new server or upgrading security software, may be critical to achieve by a certain time or may need to be completed at a time that causes least disruption to the business.

Communicating the change
Whether it is just to your team that you need to communicate with or the project is part of a wider organizational change, communication is a vital component. No change management plan will work without it and it’s usually the responsibility of managers to open and maintain clear communication channels which should be defined before the change takes place.

Measurement of the plan’s success
As with any plan, you must have appropriate metrics in place to measure success. Gathering and analyzing data before and after a change will be key in assessing the success or failure of change and the change management plan.

Tracking online visitors update from Hitsteps

This update involve all of our customers. According to this update, you will see different number of active online visitors (probably lower) and higher number of idle visitors.

Hitsteps tracking engine developed back in 2013. In that time, Hitsteps web analytics competitors such as Clicky, Woopra, W3Counter or HiStats were detecting live online users using rough analysis.

Some such as W3Counter were just looking at last 10 minutes unique visitor page views and using it as live user counter. It served the purpose at that time and Hitsteps utilised this method.

As time goes by, we added a ping method to our analytics which ping your visitors every few seconds to ensure visitor remain online. We were then shifted from old method to a hybrid method of calculating between Active and Idle online visitors.

As of today, Hitsteps is using a completely revamped method to calculate online visitors. Hitsteps now look at your visitors activity, tab focus and other information to determine if visitor is online, idle or offline.

Now, if your visitor do not interact with your website (scrolling, moving mouse, clicking, …) or focus out from your website (opening another page in another tab, clicking on another window or minimising browser window), we will immediately mark this visitor as Idle.

Likewise, If browser window get focus, mouse movement or scroll, we will mark this visitor as Active online.

We believe this change is necessary in order to show accurate online active and online idle visitors. however it will cause our numbers to differ from previous version of Hitsteps Analytics and perhaps all other web analytics out there who are using old methods to detect online visitors.

Tracking behaviour update from Hitsteps

This update involve all links that point to a javascript function. Do not get concerned if you see a small reduction in your pageviews.

Hitsteps previously count clicks on <a> links with href=’javascript:…’ as a pageview. however, these javascript functions are mainly used to run a dynamic function on the page such as adding items to shopping cart.

It is necessary for us to release this update to avoid higher than usual pageviews on websites which are using javascript:void(0); method a lot. As a side effect of this update, if your website use <a href=’javascript:..’.> method, you might notice a small reduction in number of your pageviews.

This update has been published to our mainstream tracker script and will be rolling out to all of our customers within next few days.

Hitsteps Analytics now accept Bitcoin and altcoins

Growing popularity for cryptocurrencies cannot be denied and while it could be start of transforming to a new currency system, Hitsteps now accept Bitcoin along side PayPal and credit cards. We also support Litecoin, Dash, Ethereum, Basic Attention Token and other digital currencies.

You may purchase your monthly web analytics using our cryptocurrency payment gateway from now on.

Update 13 January 2018: We support RaiBlocks payments effective immediately.

Bing PPC Bots pageviews crawl various pages in website

After few of our customers complaint about Bing PPC bot invalidating their pageviews and keep visiting their websites, we have started to find a way to block this. It messed up their analytics data by generating fake pageviews that look like a real user.

We had setup a monitor to identify pattern of this visitor in your analytics and we needed some time until we can acquire sufficient amount of data to analyze this.

They come randomly and at different IP addresses so we could not simply block IP addresses, however all of those IP addresses origin were from Microsoft Azure servers which allows us to backtrace and identify them this way. We have used data set from our database using Hitsteps too and we identified Microsoft Azure hits to be bot, and in Hitsteps, we only count real human visits. We have forbidden our tracker to track Microsoft Azure from now on, and it should not re-appear in your list of visitors anymore.

Interestingly, Microsoft use real world browser useragents which belong to his competitors. We identified useragents that belong to Safari 53 on Windows 7. Safari 7 on iOS 7 and Firefox 23 on Windows 8! We could not simply block it from user-agents due to variety.

As a reddit user put it out this way, During the editorial verification process in Bing Ads, your site may receive traffic from the Bing Ads crawler, which shows as Microsoft Azure. This crawler searches and determines the content of your website by following all of the links and branches throughout your site and pulling relevant keywords from the pages. The depth and frequency of the crawl is related to the number of ads and keywords in your ad groups. The Bing Ads crawler visits sites that it is checking in a very controlled manner. This activity should not affect servers or cause “inaccessible website” errors. (They represent a real browser, therefor made it hard for us to differentiate them from a bot at beginning.)

Bing Ads crawls your site(s) by using the destination URLs that you specify for each keyword-ad combination in your ad group. If you have large keyword lists, your destination URLs may receive hundred of clicks or more. Because this traffic can occur during a very short time, sometimes within only one or two hours, this activity may appear to be invalid activity.

Note that you are not charged by Bing Ads for this traffic, and this activity is not reported on any Bing Ads reports.

This behaviour now can be detected by Hitsteps Analytics and blocked from our users view unless they disable bot protection in their analytics setting.

Introducing Uptime Monitoring System featuring Auto-Recovery feature

We are introducing Smart Uptime Monitoring system, bundled into your Hitsteps dashboard.

Let your servers recover automatically. Know about downtimes instantly, do not let your visitors be the one who notify you about your website downtime.

By activating this service, we scan your servers and websites every minute and notify you instantly if we find out they are down. we verify each downtime from multiple countries to remove false alarms.

Upon downtime, we can notify you via Call, SMS or Email.

Additionally, you can define DNS Failover using Cloudflare or setup SSH commands to recover your failed website automatically.

This feature is available from Pro plan onward. You can find Uptime Monitoring in left sidebar of your Hitsteps Dashboard.

Updated OS & Browser detection plus Tor Browser detection

Did you know Facebook secretly and slowly became one of the major browsers in mobile world? Yes, Facebook Web Browser that nobody ever talk about! and we can detect it for you.

When a visitor click on your link in Facebook or Facebook Messenger, It does not open your website in a separate web browser (unless user has opted out from Facebook In-App Browser), It open your website inside of Facebook Apps. And most analytics softwares are simply pointing this as Chrome, or Safari.

We’ve went one step ahead, and we can detect Google Search App Browser on iOS, and even Instagram Browser. We will extend this In-App browser detection for common apps as we find them.

We are trying out best to show most accurate view of your visitors, removing non-human and bots from your stats. However, certain anonymity programs are known to pass out wrong information in order to mis-guide tracking apps. They are doing it for good reasons of course which is to protect users privacy, and we are not trying to decode and reveal what is being hidden, instead, Hitsteps would not show wrong browser or OS for Tor browser users.

Tor Browser pass out information saying it is a Firefox on Windows 7. Try it on Linux or macOS, still it report Windows 7! In order to provide accurate view for our customers, now we can detect if a user is using Tor Browser and show Tor browser icon (instead of Firefox) and show Unknown OS (instead of Windows 7)

We are not decoding what is real OS, but at least, we are not blindly passing wrong information to our users.

Following up on Apple’s WWDC17 event few days ago, Hitsteps updated OS and Browser list can now detect Safari 11 on macOS High Sierra as well as older versions of macOS, with appropriate OS Icon tailored for each OS X. Same goes for Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, …) and Android versions (such as KitKat, Nougat, Marshmallow and Android O)

With release of Samsung Galaxy S8, Samsung has released Samsung Browser 5 which we can detect it as well as Samsung Smart TV browsers.

Human Psychology and Device’s Battery Life

Website Visitors Battery life tracking

Perhaps you noticed battery indicator level of 100% stay much longer than usual in your mobile devices and this percentage get reduced faster and faster as time goes by. You’re not alone. Your phone might show 100% battery when it is actually 90%. Why is it this way?

Users behaviour varies and it depend on battery life!

Imagine you are sitting on your desk, with your laptop connected to a wired adaptor and battery is 100% full. It means you are sitting on this desk for quite sometime.

Sitting on same desk with 10% battery life while plugged in to adaptor, means you are just back to your desk.

Likewise, being on a battery of 95% and unplugged to adaptor, means you’ve just left your desk, and 10% of battery life on a battery, means you’ve had a long day and still not back to your comfort place, your desk, where you can charge your device.

This is same difference that play a strong role for differences between desktop and mobile users behaviours.

You get the idea? How likely it is for a user to purchase your product when on just 5% battery left if your product is Food? or if your product is a Laptop?
If you’re selling time-sensitive product like Food, your conversion rate goes higher. If you’re selling more expensive product like Laptop, your sale chance is lower.
Uber reported that their customers are more likely to accept surcharge and get a ride when their users battery life is low, so should you treat users with 5% battery left and those who are on 100% battery and plugged in, same?

Hitsteps provide you with a tool that you can monitor each individual visitors in your website and see their current device battery life, remaining time to finish their battery to help you address them better. Be it get used for conversion monitoring, or by a live chat agent, who see customer battery is low and time to address the user before he ran out of battery is running out! Hitsteps website visitors battery life tracking tool support those visitors who are using a compatible browser and device.