Can it track page views and provide data to author?

Vic,

I am not one of the developer support folks for this module but have used it in several implementations.

Tracking unique visits to specific nodes is not something this module was built to accomplish "out of the box".

Initially, I wanted to go down this same road but found that by looking at the table used by this module to store "click thru" data, that it only populates seven (7) fields: gid, nid, day_clicks, week_clicks, total_clicks, first, and last.

I would recommend looking into an analytics package which is designed to slice and dice your site's incoming traffic (e.g. reports by incoming IP) for specific nodes/URLs on your site.

* I checked the analytics packages I use and none of them have this type of detailed report in their default set. However, since the data is all there, it is reasonable that I should be able to create a custom report.

I have found that using this module works great for newsletters and ads directing traffic back to your site.

There was a plan to provide more granular logging. This involves changing the database table so it has the info we need:

So, the "groups" would become campaigns, and would have a table like this. This is better than the numbers 1, 2, 3 that are used now.

campaign_id int(2) NOT NULL default '0', // campaign group id
name varchar(255) NOT NULL default '', // name
description longtext, // description
start_time int(11) NOT NULL default '0', // start time

Then a new table with the granular data is created, in addition to the summary table that already exists:

click_id int(10) NOT NULL auto_increment,
nid int(10) NOT NULL default '0',
uid int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
click_time int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
host varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',

We can even add the browser string as well, so we can do operating system and browser statistics if we want.

However, the project that this was being planned for did not materialize.

So, if someone wants to improve the module with a patch, please submit one.

http://drupal.org/node/217999