Referral ID

I dont understand how this works

[this_guy]

hello guys,

im prity new to all this but i have a website in progress(making in dreamweaver mx).

Well my problem is that i dont know how to make referral ID's. For example - www.somewebsite.com/ref=232 or somthing like that.

Its just that i want to start selling on my website>people sign up to purchase from the site but i want to be able to give them a referral ID or a link for them to give to friends/family that will include there referral ID.

So when there friend clicks on the like(ie, www.somewebsite.com/ref=232) the person that gave the link to there friend will get a point. When that person gets a certain amount of people to sign up using his/her link (www.somewebsite.com/ref=232) he will then have a certain amount of points which will allow him a discount on his next purchase. But i really dont know how to do this :( , any help will be grateful!

thanks :)

[cgrantski]

Use the home page and a "?" instead of / ---

www.somewebsite.com/index.html?ref=232

There's probably a way to not have to type the index.html part but I don't know what it is, other than a server-side redirect.

[this_guy]

thanks for your reply but the thing is, i dont know how to make referrals :( i dont understand how does that last bit (ref=33) would tell me that this person has been refered by person 33? like does it somehow send me a e-mail telling me about this?

[gamb]

so you want to know how on your end you track how many clicks, and what that referred person actually does?

(i want to know the answer too...)

[cgrantski]

If you give each friend a different URL (one friend is ref #22, another friend is ref #38) and they pass that URL on to somebody who types in [site.com...] then you will see all of their page requests listed one by one in your site's hosting logs. Their very first request, the request for the page they land on, will show the "ref=22" and by counting all the different ref numbers you'll know how many visits resulted from each friend. This will make more sense once you have opened one log and looked around.

A statistics program will tabulate this for you but if your logs aren't too big you can also do it in Excel or even a good text editor. But you'll have to get those logs from whoever does your hosting. If you want to get an e-mail you'll have to get some good code going.

Does that help?