stat counter/tracking program

I am lost there is so many of these

[SIRokai]

I've been looking through the postings here WW but did not find a posting that could help me to decide.

I am launching an affiliate site for a specific product and want to track the links the users click on to better customize the site when the 1st update is in place.

I understand that the 3rd party (eg CJ) will do something similar but I dont really think they will provide me with detailed information...

Can anyone recommend me a good program...a free one if possible

Another thing... do I need a script to do redirects or do these 'affiliate managers' provide them?

[larryn]

It really depends upon how you do the affialite tracking. You could do like a big bookseller and give each affilaite an ID that they pass to your site: www.me.com/index.html?affID=12345; or you could try to capture referrers in your log (but sometimes that will be blocked by the user's browser); or you could give each affiliate their own entry (landing) page: www.me.com/aff1.html, www.me.com/aff2.html, etc. each of which would have either a re-direct or inclusion of the content you want.

Personally, I'd go with option 1, and use a log analyzer to get the affID's.