Tracking Link Hits

[John Howell]

I would like to track the number times a viewer clicks on
a link that sends them to an off-web page. [I have a
list of links to various resources, and would like to
know if, and how often, they are being used so I know
which ones have value to the visitor.]

I have devised one way to do this, by making my link go
to a page on my site which uses a redirect [meta http-
equiv="refresh" content="
0;URL=http://www.destinationpage,htm/"] to send the
visitor to the destination page. My "redirect page" has
a hit counter which I use to track this transfer.

The problem with this is that there is a slight delay (3-
10 seconds) while this redirect is happening, which
could "lose" some impatient folks. In addition, it means
that I have to create a separate "redirect page" for
every link i want to track, which seems like a lot
of "bloat".

Is there a faster, more efficient way to accomplish this
kind of tracking without the need to create unique pages
for each link? This seems like something that would have
a tremendous amount of potential.

Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide.

 

[Jon Spivey]

Hi John,

There is but you'll need some server side code. Basically you'd direct all
your links to the same page, say out.asp, with the url in the querystring so
a link might look like this
out.asp?url=http://site.com/page.htm
Then on out.asp you can track the link stick details into a database and
send the user on to wherever they want to go.

I don't think you can do anything like this without using server side code.

 

[Steve Easton]

If you can run cgi scripts on your server, you might try the free cgi redirect from
AnalogX
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/cgirdir.htm

--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
95isalive
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