Referral Spammers, no more!

If you looked at your analytics data recently and looked at your referral section, probably you have noticed some strange referrals from websites that you cannot identify why they should send you visitors!

email-gateway-anti-spam

We are strictly against spam and automated bots in hitsteps and we are against this method of referral spamming too. as you know, your analytics number and list of online users only reflect your true human visitors and you won’t see bots, spammers and spiders in your web statistics.

These services are not actually sending you real traffic! we have analyzed all traffics coming from them for all of our customers and we noticed a bounce rate of 100%, it means all visitors come through them close website as soon as it is loaded. this is highly unlikely scenario from human-line browsing.

so why they do this? They are actually advertising to you. this way, they can show their name to you in your statistics report. so you get curious and follow up to see who are they and visit their website! so this way they increase their visibility not only in hitsteps, all other analytics such as google analytics, piwik and … too, as they show them as your top referral once they have send enough (useless and bounced!) traffic to you.

We don’t know how they send this traffic to you, but we assure you this traffics are spam and therefore their name in your referral section is spam as well, as a result we have took necessary action to protect our users from spam statistics and continue to provide real human web analytics.

Starting from today, this referrals won’t show up as your online visitor, won’t count as a pageview and won’t show up in your referrals in hitsteps.

If you are only using hitsteps, then you are protected!

Make widgets in your plugin compatible for WordPress v4.3

WordPress v4.3 is just a week and half away to be released and it is a major update for developers!

WordPress team being innovative again and deprecated PHP4 style classes in old WordPress, therefor, your plugin is going to show an ugly error in case you use WP_Widget class to show a widget in your website sidebar.

We use hitsteps live support widget and statistics widget in our plugin, so we had to update our codes too and…

Here is what to do!

Open your editor and search for any reference to “extends WP_Widget”

2015-08-09_01-18-49

Your widget class have a name, and most probably (PHP4 style), name of your plugin is used as a function inside of same class. Look here, here’s ours:

2015-08-09_01-22-06

Now, change function name to __construct(). this is new way of defining default function of a class.

And inside of that function, you’ll have a code that call WP_Widget.
It can be parent::WP_Widget, $this->WP_Widget, {something}->WP_Widget… which all are deprecated!

You have to change that to parent::__construct(…);

Here is how it should look like after you done all this changes:

2015-08-09_01-26-15

Number of “extends WP_Widget” lines you have match number of widgets your plugin create. You’ll need to repeat this process for each of them.

Congrats! Your plugin is officially compatible with WordPress v4.3

If you wish to read more about this, you can read this and this from official WordPress team.

We have just released our update for WordPress v4.3 users today, so you can expect a smooth upgrade to new WordPress regarding our analytics service 🙂

[Solved] Windows 10 update stealing your Internet connection. Disable it immediately

Have you noticed your internet is slower or your data is finishing faster after upgrading to Windows 10?

Hitsteps analytics code in our customers and members website show a huge sudden increase for Windows 10 users, thanks to Microsoft’s automatic update. Just after 1 day of release, 14 million windows users upgraded to Windows 10 and number is increasing, But handling such a huge amount of updates are quite difficult for microsoft, so they are using your computer for it too! Windows 10 is best windows since Windows 7, it actually fixed all mess up caused by Windows 8 and make it look like Windows 7 again!

However, did you know that once you moved to Windows 10, you are sharing your windows updates with the world? Yes, you read it correctly. In short, Microsoft use your computer and your internet connection to distribute Microsoft updates to people around the world. (same way Torrent technology is working) How’s that sound to you if you have a limited traffic quota to use on your Internet and have to be careful about amount of data transferred from/to your computer?
We wish Microsoft disable this feature by default but don’t worry, here is how to disable it.

This feature is called WUDO (Windows update delivery optimization) and aim to speed up update download process (and do a good job in doing it) however it might cost you your internet package if you are not on an unlimited data plan.

How to disable Windows update delivery optimization (WUDO)?

It is very easy. click on start menu, go to setting, open update and security. click on Choose how updates are delivered.

Here it is! You can change it to share updates with only your local PCs only or turn this feature off entirely.

USgSWVl

What it takes to be best web analytics solution available?

Hitsteps do provide free license for most complicated features and we do it for a reason. More users will lead to more feedbacks and ultimately lead to more quality platform for everyone.

We have based direction of hitsteps analytics based on our users feedback. Ask for it and you shall receive. If you don’t see a feature in hitsteps, it is just because you haven’t asked for it yet!

You have asked how to add it to your wordpress website, we provided you a comprehensive plugin which not only integrate hitsteps to your WordPress site, but it also add amazing tracking features for your contact and commerce forms.

You asked about Joomla, we provided you with an easy way. We tried to bring it to Drupal, but drupal teams being very strict about rules, we are still working on it. We don’t (DO!) blame it on them!

Those of you who experienced taste of hitsteps on your wordpress woocommerce site are asking for us to add same implementation for Shopify, we heard you and it is on the way!

Feature wise, you asked for heatmap tracking, you got it. Labels, goals and campaigns? Long time ago!

You said you want live chat with visitors? Isn’t it supposed to be a different service than web analytics? No, it is not if it can be integrated with web analytics to provide details of visitor who is chatting with you.

Now, we want to target you again. As an entrepreneur, as a business owner, manager of website in your company, as a webmaster, an internet shop owner or as a blogger, be it WordPress, weebly, tumblr or just a plain html site, what do you want to know about your website visitors? What features do you think are needed and are essential for a web analytics?

We are giving away free lifetime license to most interesting idea, no matter how big your traffic is!
Drop us a message until end of August and you can be our lucky winner.

Happy brainstorming!