Is there any way you can track where visitors are going from your site

Client wants to know if an external link is being used

[Ranger]

Hi gang:

I'm scratching my head over this one: we have an external link to a large company site, and a client wants to know whether visitors are using it or not - but it HAS to stay on its current page.

I could code the external link through a meta-tag redirect page, and count that page, but that leaves room for some error if the page fails (though I could also put a hard link on it as a redundancy).

Is there any other way to track this?

[oilman]

A click tracking script is the ticket for this situation Ranger. There's a whole slew of them at Hotscripts both in Perl [hotscripts.com] and PHP [hotscripts.com].

[amoore]

You can certainly have the link point to something on your site which will send the visitor to the ultimate destination. I would not recommend a meta-refresh tag page, though, as there are better ways.

For instance, webmasterworld sends (or at least used to) all external links through some kind of script to keep track of the outbound traffic. I belive the script returns a "302 resource moved temporarily" header or something along those lines.

One way that I have thought in the past that would work with minimal scripting or anything is by using mod_alias as described in the last post of this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Essentially, you set up a "directory" in which all resources are actually redirected offsite. You can then look for the different entries for stuff in that directory in your regular log statistics package.

Hope it helps you out.