Tracking clicks from external link

To use cookies or sessions?

[Amaryllis]

Hey
I want to track and count the number of visitors who come to my webpage from a particular external url - need to keep the counting to a single click for a particular user for a day. Logic is that if the same user comes from the external url the next day then I wld like to increment the counter. Basic logic is counter incrmented for every user per day per click.
Shld I go in for sessions based coding or cookie based coding (php programing)
Thanks in advance.

[edited by: Amaryllis at 11:55 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2007]

[Receptional]

Cookies.

Neither option is fool proof, but sessions cause many more side issues than cookies and if a user blocks (presumably first party?) cookies, then they will probably also not end up with the same session ID in a second visit either.

just my humble opinion... I am not a coder.

[Keeper54]

If you can somehow hide your session id's so that a SE bot can't see them (not sure if it can be done) then either is okay. My experience is that SE's grab session id's as they crawl, which can have negative effect on your search engine rankings. Personally, I use cookies for this issue.