Getting
your Visitor's Details Using PHP
Getting your Visitor's Details Using PHP
You can get quite a bit of information about your visitors without
having to use a third party tracking software. I'll outline the
PHP commands you can use to capture some of this data. The details
you capture can be saved into a database, and retrieved later to
check your site's performance and user details. The following information
is captured using the server variable ($_SERVER) which is available
from PHP 4.10 onwards.
Visitor's IP address :
You can get the visitor's IP address using the following command:
<? $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP']; ?>
This will give you the vistor's IP address. You can use this along
with an ip to country converter database to see from which country
your visitors are come in from. You can head over to
http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ for one such script.
You can use PHP to resolve the ip address to a domain name to get
the visitor's ISP in most cases. The ISP's domain will show up if
PHP is able to resolve the IP to a proper domain. You can do this
as follows.
<?
$ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
$visitor_host = @getHostByAddr( $ip );
?>
Note : On some servers, using getHostByAddr to resolve domains
may cause the script to slow down.
Referring Page :
You can capture the referring page, which will give you an indication
of which site is sending traffic to you.
<? $referrer_page = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; ?>
This will give you the entire URL from which the visitor came
to your site. For example if the visitor came from a google search
for "i-pod", the referrer url would look something like
this :
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=i-pod&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=50
If you don't want the entire URL captured, but just the domain
name stored into the database, you can strip the rest of the URL
and save it to the database like so:
<?
$referrer_page =
parse_url(htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])));
?>
This will save the referring page as :
http://www.google.co.in/
The page being Accessed :
You can also capture the page being accessed on your server. This
information will help you evaluate which parts of your site is getting
more page views.
A more advanced user can also use this information to create a
click-stream of the user. A click-stream is the path that a user
follows while he goes through your site. This lets you see how effective
your site's navigation is.
<? $requested_page = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>
If the visitor is accessing your page,
http://www.yourdomain.com/guestbook.php, the requested page would
be 'guestbook.php'.
These pieces of information will help you build a visitor tracker
in PHP, which will be able to tell you quite a bit about your visitors
and how they use your site.
About the Author Vinu Thomas is a consultant
on Webdesign and Internet Technologies. His website is http://www.vinuthomas.com
He is presently consulting http://www.indiaresortssurvey.com
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