Counting clickouts?

Counting clicks to other domains from your domain?

[JAB Creations]

There lots of information about where visitors are coming FROM...how about where they are going TO?

I have links to other domains... those lucky domains them... I'd like to know who my visitors are visiting FROM my site. I was thinking PHP but then I almost smacked myself.

[bcc1234]

Use a redirect script.

Here is the idea

www.example.com/redirect.php?redirect=some-identifier

[edited by: Woz at 5:10 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2004]
[edit reason] examplified example [/edit]

[Eugenios]

If you have access to your .htaccess and log files you can do this without programming.

In your .htaccess you can create a redirect rule:

Redirect permanent /track/15 [example.com...]

Then read your site log file and look for all "/track/15" hits and there you are done.

You will have to build one redirect per external link, and you can write whatever fake url you want, I used "/track/15" as an example.

Hope this helps

Enrique

[edited by: Woz at 5:10 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2004]
[edit reason] examplified example [/edit]

[mrclark]

Sorry for sounding like a numpty, but does this mean if I have domain www.domain.com and I have an outgoing link to www.friendsdomain.com the redirect rule would be:

Redirect permanent /track/15 [friendsdomain.com...] ?

and this wouldnt matter which of my pages were linking to my friend's website?

Steve

[Opie1Canopie]

I may be oversimplifying this, but our tracking software provides data on 'exit links'. Is this what you're looking for?

Opie1

[Eugenios]

Yes, you are correct.

You can use that url to track all outgoing links to friendsdomain.

But if you want to track each outgoing link sepparately, then you will have to use a different id for each link.

It is like the service provided by tinyurl.com

In fact you can use whatever you want as a tracking id, as long as you can make it unique just to filter it with a log analisys software.

Enrique

[Eugenios]

Anyway, I must warn you that with this system and with all url based tracking system, google will pick your url and the content of the external site.

So, upon a specific search, your site may show in serps with the tracking url and the content of the external site.

So, visitors will click on that link on Google serps and it will write a hit on your log. But visitor will go straight to the external site.

This will pollute your stats and consume server resources. So my advice is to use this as a fast tracking tool and not as a long term tracking tool.

So you will have to write a robots directive to prevent googlebot from spidering those urls.

Enrique