One directory subscriber wants click-through stats

At bargain prices

[dickbaker]

My directory site--if you want to call it that--offers a searchable way to find stores within my niche that have the brands or services that visitors are looking for.

Further, my site gives these stores as much information--from ten sentences to 10,000 sentences--about what the stores offer.

Last week, I implemented a page view counter, so that my subscribing stores would know how many people are interested in them.

I only charge the stores $10 a month, and offer them a multitude of ways to be found. Do a search for "Acme widgets," and my site's in the top five. Or search for "Nebraska widget stores," and I'm at #1. Or any other search term.

The stores can put whatever info they want, and however much they want, on their pages on my site.

One of the largest widget stores in the US wants me to give them stats on the click-through's from their page on my site to their site.

I don't know how to do this.

Further, nobody else has asked for this.

Even further, it will cost me $$ to find someone on Webmaster World to do the code. (There are a couple of WW members whom I've paid over the last year, and who've done an exceptional job. Thank you).

This raises a whole bunch of questions for me. How difficult is it to employ a click-through counter from my site to another's using ASP? What's it going to cost me to have someone do it, and is it really worth doing for the $10 a month I charge this subscriber?

Even more importantly, the goal of my site is not to get people to visit my subscribers' sites, it's to get them to visit the brick-and-mortar stores.

Just to put things into perspective, if this shop got one new customer from my site who bought a medium-priced widget from them, their cost for being on my site would be covered for an entire year. If that customer came back even one more time (which has happened to many stores), that's a nice profit.

Any and all advice much appreciated.

[incrediBILL]

This technology is typically used by big marketing companies to verify the click thru managed to actually make it to the destination site as a means of validating PPC campaigns. Since you're selling flat rate advertising and not PPC their are no billing issues and the customer can simply check his WEB STATS and see exactly how many sites you physically refer to his server every month without any new technology or reports on your site.

However, the technology is relatively simple:

- Your site issues a "cookie" to the visitor for tracking purposes

- The customer destination link page has a "tracking bug" image that links back to your site:
<img src="http://mydomain.com/tracking.gif">
which actually loads a tracking web page but returns a gif

- If your tracking page detects the cookie set from your site, you have a completed click thru

Problem is if the visitor has cookies disabled it undercounts and often times the visitor can get to your site but some routing glitch stops the click thru from reaching the destination.

For $10/month I'd just tell them to check the REFERRERS section of their web stats as it's simply more accurate.