Can this even be done?

[j3r0m3]

Currently i am maintaining a corporate server A. I have an index page/ menu page stored in this corporate server A. The problem is that on this page, i have links which point to another server B which i have no control or access over.

My problem is that i want to track the hits to these pages in server B. How can i track the hit rate of all the pages in server B with all these restrictions?

I have only thought of one method which is,
for every link in the index page, i create a blank html page which contains the redirect url.

That way, by tracking the hit rate of the blank html page, i will know the hit rate of the page in server B. But i am not sure that this is the most professional thing to do.

Could anyone please shine some light on this?

[oxbaker]

build a Click page. Each link on A points to Click page. Click page logs the info in a db and redirects to the destination page on server B

every click page takes two parameters :

source
destination

source is the page on server A you came from (your index page) destination is the url they want to go to. you pass both of these to the click page so it can log the source, destination, and can redirect to the destination on server B

hth,
mcm

[gregbo]

These methods are counting clicks on the links, not hits on the actual server B. You don't have a way of actually telling if the user actually made it to any of server B's pages.

[oxbaker]

thats the only way to do it without modifying server b. you can ask them for their log files and parse them and find hits from your referrer, but without access to server B you have no way of 100 knowing if they hit it. How can you tell if someone went to a store in another city? you can't unless you got someone at that store.

[gregbo]

@oxbaker,

I think if you use your method, you should indicate to whoever is the recipient of the data that it was determined based on clicks, not hits on server B.

I actually have had to deal with this type of problem. It was important to clarify to the people who were getting the traffic reports that the clicks were not the same as a measurement of hits on the remote server. The click does not indicate whether or not the remote server was down or the pages were inaccessible, for example.

It's just a way of ensuring that an apples to apples comparison is being made.

[j3r0m3]

thanks for the discussion and the replies.

I sort of understand the click page function. Could you help me further by pointing me to a tutorial on how to go about creating a click page?

TIA,
Jerome