Web
Counters and Click Tracking
You will be able
to use web traffic analysis software to determine where your users come
from, which of your pages they visit etc. However these types of web
counters do not track where your visitors go to, as they cannot track
clicks through outgoing links.
If you have outgoing
links on your site, as part of your service, you will wish to know how
much traffic is visiting those other web sites. If these are affiliate
links, you will normally get information from the advertiser. If you
can track visitors going through other links, you might choose to modify
your content (develop that area yourself) or seek reward from the site
receiving your traffic. At the very least it will help illustrate what
your visitors are interested in.
There are two ways
you can do this:
a) use a database
to record the clicks on particular links. A programmer could build this
for you, and provide the instructions on how to code your outgoing links
so they can be tracked. You can also use a hosted service from Prolinkz
b) a simple alternative
method is to make use of your web traffic monitoring software capability
to track visits your own pages. Instead of a link going direct to the
outgoing site, you link to another "bridge" page of your own,
which then immediatley redirects to the target destination. You can
then count the visits to the bridge page as visits to the external target
web site.
For example: to
produce a bridge page that will immediately redirect to Yahoo you would
make a blank page (with a file name connected to your hyperlink saying
"Yahoo") and insert this line of html code:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content= "0;url=http://www.yahoo.com">
In the above code
the "0" is the time in seconds to refresh the page, as www.yahoo.com.
