Help with page forwarding

[wilson765]

Hi,

I use hardcopy advertsing and wish to add an extention to my advert url so I can record which ads are getting a response.

ie. http://www.example.com/advert1

What would you suggest as the best way of forwarding from the /advert1 page. Ideally I would like the visitor to end up at the home page without a delay.

Hope you can help

Thanks

Steve

[edited by: encyclo at 12:38 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[Fotiman]

Do something like this instead:

http://www.example.com/?advert1

This way, you'll automatically load the home page and you can get the advert value from the querytstring and no redirection required.

[designinginteractive]

By using a query string, as mentioned in the reply, the statistics won't be separated, it will appear that all traffic is going directly to the home page.

You'll need a server side script to track the visits via querystring.

We regularly use mod-rewrite to allow us to rewrite visits like:

http://www.example.com/AdCampaign

to

http://www.example.com/index.php?TrackVisit=AdCampaign

then simply save the required information into a database for reporting later.

For a simpler solution, you could just build separate pages for each campaign:

http://www.example.com/AdCampaign.php

then in the AdCampaign.php page, redirect to the home page with simple php

<?php header("Location: http://www.example.com");?>

This will show the visits separately in your server logs, but may not in all 3rd party scripts, so make sure you are using something like AWstats or an application that reads direct from compiled server logs.