Count Outgoing Referrals

Count number of ppl clicking on my link trades

[neveremail]

Hi,

I have been doing a number of link trades and would like to know if there is a script or similar that would allow me to count the number of times people surfing my site click on a link to one of my referrers.

I would like to do this so I can track my outgoing traffic to my link trade partners to ensure i am giving my best link trade partners the most hits.

Thanks

Chris

[rytis]

This would require some kind of redirect, many webmasters will refuse to trade links, if you are not offering plain direct link to their site.

One of the reasons : [webmasterworld.com...]

[jorj]

I've been trying to find an answer to this question too. I'm a programmer and still I have to ask others for ideeas. Here are the two ways I found by now, none of them I applied for because is not the perfect solution.

1. double the links in a page and put one between invisible <DIV> tags for search engines and the other pointing to a redirect page to record the clicks.

2. show different pages to users vs search engines (.htaccess). Easy to get caught even by an automatic robot and this will probably result in banning your site.

I look forward for a magic soution too

[martinibuster]

Doesn't anyone use a log analyzer anymore? Even a hosted traffic analyzer can tell you what Exit Links a user used on whatever days or time period you want to know.

[jorj]

Note that you are talking about Exit Pages not Exit links! Feel the difference?

[martinibuster]

>>>Note that you are talking about Exit Pages not Exit links!

Dude, clean your monitor and re-read my post: Does it say pages or links?

I track what links users left on, even which affiliate links they used to leave a site, in the manner I mentioned above.

[jorj]

Ya, ya..

Move your head up a little and see ..it's thread #2. So once we understand that redirection is not the best soution we can move forward...to thread #3.

we can continue with the theory if you want or drop it in favour of a real solution (if any).

[martinibuster]

Hmm, is there a language difficulty here? I DID write exit links, not pages, as you asserted. So your point in message 5 is incorrect.

The original question is:

I would like to... track my outgoing traffic to my link trade partners.

Let me make this as clear as I can make it. A log tracking utility, for instance, a hosted tracker, can track the outgoing traffic to my link trade partners.

[jorj]

..or we can get back and define what a link partner is. Yours are probably "http://mysite.edu/redirect.php?id=102192" while mine are like "http://his_site.com/" .Guess what a search engine will think about these two links.

I remind you we're debating link trade partners not business partners or other types which means they will want a real link not one which looks nice in the owner's log tracking utility

[martinibuster]

or we can get back and define what a link partner is. Yours are probably "http://mysite.edu/redirect.php?id=102192" while mine are like "http://his_site.com/".

Dude, what planet are you on? You keep making things up to "prove" I'm wrong. Knock it off. Why don't you just admit you are mistaken and move on? For instance, your post# 5 is still wrong. And your last assumption shows that you clearly do not understand what I am referring to when I say, "hosted tracking solution".

A hosted tracking solution can involve as little as one line of JS at the bottom of a web page (for instance, right above the closing body tag) that can track any (let me clarify this for you, ANY) kind of exit link.

There is no need to modify an outbound link to track who uses it and when. Easy peasy.

[ken_b]

MB;

Any down side to using one of these hosted tracking outfits?

Are they expensive?

Any hints on what to look for and what to avaoid?

[spaceylacie]

What program or java script do you use, martinibuster? I don't know anything about this either but it would be nice if this info showed up in my web stats. My site host provides a program that only shows exit pages, not exit links. I guess my program is a little behind the times. I was under the impression, until I read your posts, that this could only be done with a redirect command(something I refuse to do). Please enlighten us with specifics.

[neveremail]

How do you do set up hosted tracking solution?

[WA_Smith]

I think jorj has already seen what i would consider the best method

<img id="counterimg" src="mygraphiccounter.pl" width="1" height="1">

<a href="thelink" target="newpage" onclick="counterimg.src='mygraphiccounter.pl?thelink'">

Without opening the link in a new page you may not see hits for faster sites.

[martinibuster]

Look, I don't want to promote specific hosted web stats providers, but there is one called opentracker.net that will track the specific exit links that people use.

It will also show you realtime stats as people are on your site at that very moment including their country, ip, isp, referrer and search string. They also have a FREE thirty day trial.

It's an affordable stats package, and it's not the only one that can do that little trick. So shop around for what is right for you.

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:04 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2005]

[WA_Smith]

martinibuster I need to read more carefully, I myself always tend to want to do everything in house. That makes me very familiar with the limitation of the underling technology ... which really does not matter if you only want a percent value and i know of nothing that gives a 100% correct value, best you can do is a percent value (them darn corps want to hide behind proxies and multiple IPs).

[martinibuster]

>>>corps want to hide behind proxies and multiple IPs

Yeah, like AOL etc.

Nevertheless, the topic of this discussion is not concerned with who is clicking out but with how many times specific outgoing links are clicked, and a hosted web tracking solution will do the trick.

[WA_Smith]

Granted But i am still going to do it in house (even if its free) ... and I wont go 302 redirect.

[ypsites]

Martinibuster,

Your post is so interesting to me - I've been using a php script on each link to track clicks for my clients (who pay for listing and actually value the fact I can track the clicks for them -- they've never even heard of SEO in most cases).

I'd like to try your approach because it just sounds a lot cleaner in every way. But, here's a question, can you exclude crawler 'clicks' with a solution like this? (With our php script we can either use robots.txt to exclude the bots altogether, or back them out of our homegrown reporting.) Also, since it's based on js, is there any problem if the user's browser isn't reading js?

If you have a moment to reply, I would appreciate it. And thanks for the illuminating post ... it appears you thought this was generally available info, but (apparently like some other folks) I was laboring under the assumption that outgoing clicks couldn't be tracked!

Laurie

[martinibuster]

One of the downsides of hosted tracking is that it doesn't track the bots. Which is why I also mine server logs from the desktop.

>>>Also, since it's based on js, is there any problem if the user's browser isn't reading js?

Yeah, it's a problem. But if you have JS rollover navigation, they're going to be having problems with that as well. hehe

[ypsites]

Thanks for the reply!

[tsinoy]

hmm... isn't it easy to create a simple javascript to do tracking?

ie. <a href='http://www.example.com' onclick='javascript:gotclicked("link1")'>example</a>

function gotclicked(name){
... stores this on a db?
return true;
}

is this what the hosted traffic software do?