ConverTastic^tm

Where are Your Conversions REALLY Coming From?

Search Help Page

The Search window is where you research your conversions. In the center of the window is the point-and-click interface to your database files. You do not need to know any of the SQL database query language to use ConverTastic. However, if you do know SQL, click the Show Code check-box and you can see the SQL that the program is generating. You can also type over the SQL to do advanced queries.

The list at the upper-left shows all the database files that you have set-up on the Manage window. When you click on a database file, you will see the notes about that file to the right. ConverTastic will only search the selected database file.

In most cases, you will download the previous day's log each morning and import it into your database. If you also want to download the current day's log, which isn't complete yet, you can still search it without importing it. Drag-and-drop it from your desktop to the box at the upper-right to tell ConverTastic where it is. Then click the "Load Daily File into Memory" button. ConverTastic will create an in-memory database which you can search exactly like one of your database files by using the "Search Daily File" option above the Search button. If you download a fresh daily log file, you will have to close down ConverTastic to clear the memory database, restart the program, and then import it.

To search on IP Address, just check the "Use IP" box, paste your IP into the box to the right, and click the Search button. The IP address you search on must be in the same format as what is in your database. If your server logs only have plain IP numbers, then you must use plain IP's when you search. If you have a mix, perhaps old logs with plain IP's, and new logs with resolved IP's, then you should first search with the resolved IP and if you don't solve the conversion, search again on the plain IP. We do recommend that you make sure all your IP numbers are resolved either by your hosting company, or by using ConverTastic's Lookup IP's window.

To search on User Agent, you will first have to locate a log entry using the IP address. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing what browser your customer used, unless perhaps your shopping-cart system captures it.

Searching on Request comes in handy if you don't have an IP address. For example, you can pull up a list of all the people who visited your order page during a certain time period and perhaps identify your customer by an IP address that matches his email address.

You should use the Date Range search each time you import a new log file. Take a quick look at the data imported to make sure that your hosting company has not screwed up, which will happen from time to time. Keep an eye out for gaps in the data where entries may have been lost due to a server crash, etc.

Use the IP Range search only when you have plain IP numbers in your database. You would use this, for example, if you had a customer on a dial-up connection. When you hit a dead-end because his IP address changed, you can look it up, find the block it is in, and then do your next search on the entire block in combination perhaps with his user-agent. That would get you a list of visitors from that ISP using that particular browser. This often works well, but keep in mind that many ISP's have many different IP blocks. While it is likely that a dial-up account would usually get IP's from the same local block, there is no guarantee that it will.

Using the Equals, Begins, Ends, and Contains settings. On very large databases, ConverTastic will still search very rapidly on IP Address and User-Agent using the Equals setting because it indexes that data and can jump right to whatever you are looking for. However, if you need to search on something like "User-Agent contains 'Firefox'", then the program must examine every record in the database and that could take a while. ConverTastic may appear frozen, but rest assured that it is in fact searching. Using Begins and Ends can have the same affect.

Since indexing imposes a lot of burdens, the Request and Referrer are not indexed. Normally, you never search on Referrer because that is the piece of data that you don't have and are trying to find. And since pages on your website are requested by zillions of people, it usually isn't helpful to search on the Request, so it is not indexed either. However, you can speed up a Request search by also setting a narrower date range. Since the date is indexed, ConverTastic can first pull out the records in the date range, and then search those for the Request criteria. If you have a decent computer, you will rarely have to wait long for ConverTastic to finish searching even a gigantic database.