PPC software

Software to track clicks on links within own site.

[gckorn]

Can anyone recommend software that can track clicks on links within one's own site.

Not looking to track other PPC sources. Rather, looking for a way to track clicks on outbound links placed on my own pages.

Thanks!

[larryn]

gc,

You need to be able to 'capture' the clicks via some sort of re-direct. Instead of pointing directly to the off-site URL, you would use a re-director script that would get logged (in your server access log for instance) on your site.

For example, instead of:

<a href="www.thatsite.com">Click me</a>

you would use:

<a href="/cgi/clickout.php?www.thatsite.com">Click me</a>

and the clickout.php script would look like:

<?php
header("Location: http://".$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);
exit;
?>

Of course, you could do the same with Perl, ASP, mod-rewrite (I think), heck, even shell scripts, depending upon your setup.

Larry

[gckorn]

Larry,

Thanks for this. I understand what you are saying as to the first part, i.e., how to code the link and what that would accomplish.

However, I don't know how to do the PHP script part of it. I know that I am using an ENSIM Linux server, but I cannot begin to figure where the snippet of code goes and, even if I did, where I would begin to look for and pull the stats or even reset the stats.

Looks like it could be really simple though. Any ideas on next steps would be great. PM or otherwise.

thanks sir,
gc