Newbie Question on Counting Clicks for Advertising

How would I count clicks from a link on my site to an Advertiser's Site?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I have a site that could be a valuable source of advertising revenue and I am considering offering pay per click to advertisers. Can anyone tell me how I would go about tracking the number of times people clicked an ad on my site to go to an advertiser's site?

I am no expert at web design so any solution would have to be relatively simple. Also, what is the best way to sell this to any advertiser's from the perspective of proving to them that they are getting what they pay for?

[cfx211]

Have the link run through a redirect URL that triggers a counter or writes a row to a table and then sends the user on to their final destination. This is a very common way to do it, and you should be able to find some scripts out there that do this.

[cgrantski]

One of the key concepts in tracking is that what gets recorded is REQUESTS, not clicks, and then only if the request actually goes to the server (web site) whose data you have access to. If it goes to another site, it's their data, and all you know is that the page with the ad was the last page the visitor asked for.

So a click on an ad does not get recorded per se. The request that the click sends is usually to your advertiser's site, for the landing page there, and it gets recorded there because that server received the request.

So if you put an invisible redirecting page on your site, and all your off-site clicks request that invisible page which in turn requests the advertiser's page, then you can look at the number of times the invisible page was requested.

Just mentioning this because it was a big aha! for me back when i was a newbie.