Tracking ezine referrals

What's the easiest way to do this?

[fom2001uk]

So you've got all your ezine links tagged with unique IDs

www.mysite.com/section1.asp?ezine_link=Dec
www.mysite.com/section2.asp?ezine_link=Dec

etc, etc

So tracking them is easy because they show up in your logs. Or is it?

For starters, you need to pick them out from all your page visits (there could be hundreds). What if I only want ezine referrals reported?

What if you want to know how everything about each click-thru? You surely need to filter (include only) for only these visits? That way you can tell when and how they arrived, where they went, how long they stayed, etc.

My problem is that our software (WebTrends) doesn't let you filter for the dynamic parts of URLs. So I can't say INCLUDE ONLY hits to "*ezine_link=Dec", and so on.

What's the solution? Software upgrade, creation of redirect pages?

How do you folks do it?

[edit_g]

If you're using webtrends you can set up redirects (for example www.yoursite.com/redirect.html?source=thisorthatnewsletterandthislink&address=http://therealurlhere). You can then set this redirect page up in webtrends in the URL parameter analysis and you should be able to quite easily set it up to track click throughs for each url.

Another good tip is to include a little a little invisible 1x1.gif (if it is an html mail) in your email. This way, by looking at how many times this image is requested, you can see how many people opened the email you sent.

Hope that helps.

<edited for ands...>

[fom2001uk]

"URL Paramater Analysis" is only available in expensive versions of WebTrends :-(

Can't we just set up a number of landing (static) pages on our server or the client's, and use old-fashioned META REFRESH tags to redirect clicks to the intended pages?

Then just run a report for those static pages.

I can just hear our programmer groaning now :-)

[Learning Curve]

ProLinkz is a $45 cgi program that tracks links. It works fine. I used to use it a lot.

[fom2001uk]

I read about that when I did a search for ezine tracking. But my question is, why do you need software?

Why can't you track links yourself? I'm no programmer, so maybe I'm missing something here.