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Cookies and you: an update
The EU cookie law goes into effect May 26. This is a great law because finally, all privacy issues will be permanently eradicated from the internet.
If there was ever an example of politicians really "getting" the internet, it would be this. The law requires that you list on your web site all of the cookies that get set by your web site, and the purpose of each cookie. Not even session cookies, or Javascript cookies that are never sent anywhere but simply used as boolean "flags", are exempt; and this makes sense, because cookies of this nature are infamous in hacker circles for their unparalleled ability to steal your credit card, read your email, and sleep with your wife. The law also requires you to get "opt in" permission from a visitor before any cookies can be set. Redirecting every visitor to a page with this information and the ability to opt in to cookies is a great solution, because every additional step between a visitor and a conversion increases revenue by 10x, according to a study from AreYouFreakingKiddingMe, LLC.
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Android widget beta
We're releasing a beta of our Android widget today. It should work on any phone running Android 2.0 or higher.
There are three widgets to choose from, depending on your needs. You can setup one or more widgets for every site in your account. The widgets are very battery friendly, even when set to pull every 5 minutes. I've been testing it for several months now with very aggressive settings and it's had zero impact on my battery life.
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Filter visitors by time spent online
We've had the ability to filter by actions, e.g. exactly 10, or greater than 10, or less than 10, for quite a while now, but we didn't have the same things for time spent online. Also, we didn't have double boundary support, e.g. more than 10 AND less than 20, which means we couldn't link to these filters directly from our engagement reports, something that has always driven me crazy (and you too, based on the emails we've received).
All of this is now fixed. It also works with the API, and the docs have been updated.
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Path analysis beta release
Almost 3 months in the oven, we are finally ready to release a BETA of our path analysis feature. We're releasing as beta because there are still a few quirks and we want your bugs reports and feedback on the interface and what you think it could do better. This is a Pro or higher feature, of course.
Part of what took so long was making it fast, because we know our visitor filtering isn't exactly the fastest thing in the world, especially for high traffic sites over large date ranges. But we are limiting this to a maximum range of 31 days at once for the time being, to make sure resource usage doesn't get too ridiculous, until we know how you are using it.
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Custom outbound link pattern matching and iframe tracking
A lot of people seem to run plugins or custom code on their site that automatically convert links to internal redirects, so that you can count them internally. For example, instead of linking to "https://clicky.com/123" (affiliate link), you might link to "http://yoursite.com/go/clicky" instead. This page then redirects the person on to the real link.
The problem with this has been that our tracking code has no idea what's actually going to happen once someone clicks that link. Without actually following the link, it simply appears to be an internal link, so we ignore it by default. There have always been several ways to track these links (CSS tagging and manual data logging), however these methods required way too much pain on your end. We don't like pain.