karmaman — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 11:41:18 +0000

Thanks for the reply ctp Awesome I am still trying to work out what it all means as I have no knowlage of my sql yetand it has gone a bit over my head but many thanks anyway.

CptAwesome — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 00:45:24 +0000

2 ways

1: ID
This is what I would consider the more accurate, and better method. Assign each person who used the banner a customer ID of sorts (some random 5 digit number?) send them to a script that register's the click, and then forwards them to the appropriate place using the php header() code.

with this, you'd need to have maybe 3 text files, or a single database table with 3 columns, in fact, you'd only techincally need 2, but ID looks better than the full http string. So the banner ad links to http://www.domain.tld/clickthru.php?id=62477 the script is pretty short (something like this):

<?
$id = $_GET['ID']; // this makes sure that you are only getting the ID from the ?ID=
/* then you'll need some code to pull the 3 pieces of information from the 3 databases about the hits, this can be done with something like MySQL or just a textfile (but that's insecure)
Now, lets say you have the array with the 3 pieces of info, the ID is the key, and the number of hits, and the URL are values you'd end up with an array like this:
array [62477][hits] = <a href="http://www.advertiser.com" class="bb-url">advertiser.com</a> // (or you can assign friendly names to them
                  [hits] = 1247
*/
So now you could go
$array[$id][hits]++;
/*code to save the processed info to the database*/
$go = "http://www.yourwebsite.com";
header(location:$go);
?>

2: http_referer
Referer is a slightly less accurate because of differences in browsers. Also, you'd be getting hits that aren't from the banners, and you'd have more info to go through. For basic tracking of this type, almost without fail I reccommend this one: http://www.plebian.com/news.php?artc=4

karmaman — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 23:55:28 +0000

Thanks for the steer to hot scripts, just to clarify,all I need is to know which site has provided the clickthrough from a banner of the clients which is placed on thier web site.

CptAwesome — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 18:58:47 +0000

http://www.plebian.com/news.php?artc=4

Abhishek Reddy — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:53:24 +0000

Have a look through hotscripts.com for ad management and referral type scripts. Even if you don't use them, you could learn from the code.

I believe you can get the referring path from the HTTP_REFERER variable. In PHP you would uses $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]:

Quote: 'HTTP_REFERER'

The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.