Do image requests show up as a referrer?

[surfgatinho]

If other sites use an image URL I supply which is a banner on my site will this show up as a referral in the logs.

I'm not talking about the actual click through using the banner just the amount of times it is requested.

I'm asking because I'm very suprised at the number of referrals I'm supposedly getting from a few sites that have our banners on them.

[cgrantski]

If the image they see on the other sites is requested from your server, their view of that image will show up in your logs as an image request, with their site as the "referrer" of that request.

If they click on that image to get to a page on your site, their request for the landing page will show up in your logs as a request for that page, with their site as the "referrer" of that request.

But log analysis programs (most of them) will NOT give you a tally of the referrers for requests for image files. You'll have to look inside the logs directly to see those referrers.

If you are supplying the exact same image to more than one other site and/or show the same image on your own site, you'll get fuzzy information if you try to use the referrer field to divide all those image views into the different sites, even if you go directly into the logs. A better method is to make multiple copies of the image file, giving each one a slightly unique name, and keeping track of which filename was given to which other site. Then just look at the counts of views of each of those filenames. You can occasionally go into the logs and take a look at the referrers of those image requests just to see if your image files have migrated to additional sites you didn't know about.

Does this help?

[surfgatinho]

Thanks for the informative answer. It helps but also makes my life more difficult!

[cgrantski]

Maybe this will help a little bit. Depending on what log analysis program you use, it's possible that you can tell it to consider *.jpg files as pages. Then you can get the program to tabulate the referrers for those images. You can also, possibly, use mass editing to change in your logs all instances of bannerimage123.jpg to bannerimage123.html, which will get you the same thing.

[surfgatinho]

Thanks again.
I'll have a look at the documentation. I use Web Trends here but have Webalizer on the server.