Using Heatmap Plugin to monitor site visits

As my demo site grows I am curious about my visitors. Based on the Apex activity log I have created a report which shows the origin of the visitors:

The location is determined from the IP address. This is done in a Dynamic Action that calls a web service at ipapi.co to retrieve the geographical location from the IP address and then stores the result into an Oracle table for subsequent usage.

NB The apex_activity_log is limited in size and the older entries are regularly deleted. Therefore the content of the log is daily copied to a another table. This table is used for the report and the map.

I like to see that the visitors come from all over the world, not only from Europe, North America and Asia, but also from Middle and South America and Africa.
It is good to see that Apex is used all over the globe!

But the list does not give me an overview of the geographical locations. So I looked for a way to visualize this data and came across the GeoHeatMap plugin by Jeffrey Kemp. It is very easy to implement and just requires a query retrieving latitude, longitude and weight.

The result is a very nice looking map:

You can get a clear view of where the visitors come from.

In the normal mode the light green color is hardly visible against the predominantly green color of the maps. By setting the plugin attribute Map Style to mostly gray, found at  https://snazzymaps.com/style/4183/mostly-grayscale, you get the quiet background with sufficient contrast.

You can see the result at:

http://www.speech2form.com/ords/f?p=141:HEATMAP

It is possible to see the geographical distribution per page by changing the Page select list. There is clear difference in distribution for the various pages of the application.

Happy apexing