Outbound Link Tracking

[kfordham281]

I produce outdoor events (think running races and mtn bike races) and have sponsors for each race. On the sponsors page there are various sponsor logos which link the the sponsors homepage. Is there a way to track the number of times people click those logos and go to the sponsors homepage? The reason I want to collect this information is to be able to tell sponsors that on avg they receive X number of clicks per month.

 

Thanks!

[TCH-Bruce]

I'm sure you can find something over at hotscripts.com.

[kfordham281]

Looks like I'll wait for either:

 

Crazy Egg: www.crazyegg.com

 

or

 

Google Analytics :www.google.com/analytics

 

as both track outbound links (among outher things). Crazy Egg has the cool factor however. Both are currenlty invite only though. I've heard Crazy Egg goes live in April.

Edited March 24, 2006 by kfordham281

[abinidi]

If you were wanting something really simple, it seems that you could have all of your sponsor links point to a php page with a specific variable.

 

The recieving PHP page could check the incoming variable to know who the sponsor was, update the database, and then redirect the user on to the sponsor's homepage.

 

All of this would take less than a second, and you could impelment it right now.

 

So lets say I had two sponsors: Acme and Emca (Acme backwords).

 

For the sponsor link, when somebody clicks on the acme logo, the target page would be something like

 

"http://www.mysite.com/redirect.php?sponsor=acme"

 

A link to Emca would be:

 

"http://www.mysite.com/redirect.php?sponsor=emac"

 

Then you would create the redirect.php file which would

 

1. connect to the database.

2. get the value from the database of the previous number of clicks for that sponsor.

3. Add one to that value.

4. Restore the value in the database.

5. Disconnect from the database.

 

Then you would have an if statement for each sponsor. The basic structure is:

 

>if sponsor="acme"
{redirect code to redirect to acme's website}
else if sponsor="emca"
{redirect code to redirect to emca's website}

 

It seems like this process would take less than a half an hour to set up completley.

 

Then when you wanted to check the number of clicks to a sponsor, you would just go to your database and look. When you wanted to reset your counter, you would just go to your database and reset it.

 

Its a quick-n-dirty way to do it, and I'm sure the other sites you've looked at have more features/etc. But this is a simple way you could get it running today.

Edited March 24, 2006 by abinidi

[kfordham281]

Paul,

 

that's a really good/simple way of doing it. I'm not very well versed in php/mysql however. Do you know of a website that could give me the basics needed for this solution in a somewhat timely manner? I'm certainly up for learning more.

 

Thanks!

Edited March 24, 2006 by kfordham281

[TCH-Don]

Yes Hotscripts is a great resource

link trackers

many free ones.

[Steve Verdino]

Hotscripts is the best place for free PHP scripts.

 

If you're looking for help setting this up, feel free to email me.

 

(if that's against TCH forum rules, please remove)

[kfordham281]

Paul,

 

that's a really good/simple way of doing it. I'm not very well versed in php/mysql however. Do you know of a website that could give me the basics needed for this solution in a somewhat timely manner? I'm certainly up for learning more.

 

Thanks!

 

I meant to say: Do you know of a website that could help teach me the basics needed for this solution in a somewhat timely manner? I'd really like to learn to code this myself too.

 

I'll have a look at hotscripts though as well. I've looked there before for scripts.

[TCH-Bruce]

Search for PHP tutorials using Google, you'll find pages and pages of help sites.