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Tracking Outbound Traffic
 
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johnnada



Joined: 08 Jan 2005
Posts: 4

PostPosted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 11:08 pm    Post subject: Tracking Outbound Traffic Reply with quote

John, maybe you can help me with another problem.

I'm interested in finding out a way, with some sort of script or script+page/redirect to track outbound traffic on the blog.

What I mean is, if someone reads the blog, hears about a fundraiser for candidate X and clicks on the link, I want to know about it.
If someone clicks on another blogs link I want to know.

Inbound traffic is an important metric, but outbound traffic and which outbound links are getting the most activity is just as important to measure and hardly ever done.

I want to be able to say at the end of the year that the site has generated xthousand political fundraising clicks, or delivered xmillion hits to other blogs.

There should be a simple way to use something besides the simple a href in a link, send a click to a script first and then to it's destination link, count the click against it's appropriate link, and increment the counts as time goes by.


Any ideas?

Thanks!
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 12:15 pm    Post subject: Re: Tracking Outbound Traffic Reply with quote

That's an interesting question. There's no facility in our service which would enable you to track outbound links. You would need to find some kind of third party hosted outbound link tracker; I am not familiar with any service of this type though I would be surprised if one did not exist.

Last edited by john on Sun Jan 09, 2005 12:41 pm; edited 1 time in total
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johnnada



Joined: 08 Jan 2005
Posts: 4

PostPosted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 12:26 pm    Post subject: PPC? Reply with quote

I was thinking that it would operate similarly to what must be going on under the hood in, say, a pay per click search engine.
I don't want to charge to deliver clicks, but in the same sense, I want to track and log each outbound click and track individal url's just as they must do. (to bill their own customers)
Link used, time, ip, exitpage. etc.
I'll keep looking, but if you stumble across anything or if anyone else can help, I'd appreciate it.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 11:22 pm    Post subject: Re: PPC? Reply with quote

Here's a link you might find interesting:

http://hotscripts.com/Remotely_Hosted/Click_Tracking/index.html

... a list of remotely hosted click tracking services.
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jn
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:08 pm    Post subject: redirects Reply with quote

Thanks john. Those are good, but the process used is bad because your links are no longer direct, and inbound traffic to other blogs, etc doesn;t look like it's coming from you.

I have a pretty good solution at http://tryontheglasses.com
See the GOP banner.
There's a 1x1 pixel image loaded (next to the banner) which is directly linked to gopbloggers.org so they get a real link on the main page.
Their banner, however, is linked to another page on my domain that is "tracked" and then the page directs them (with a meta refresh) to gop bloggers.
Benefit of course that I get to track the click and then the traffic to gopbloggers still comes from my domain.

Just entailed setting up a tracking service separate from my main one that is only responsible for tracking those "outbound" pages.
That way all the data is differentiated.
Also, interested parties could log in to see how well their links are doing on the site etc.
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jn
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:38 pm    Post subject: it works... Reply with quote

You looking I think. Smile.

 16 Jan, Sun, 16:00:42  
(ip snipped by me)
  Netscape 6  
  Macintosh   

 16 Jan, Sun, 16:12:21  
(ip snipped by me)
  Netscape 6  
  Macintosh  
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 5:04 pm    Post subject: Re: it works... Reply with quote

I was looking, but that wasn't me... Cool

Very interesting concept, I hadn't thought of doing this... So you are putting a page in your file manager which contains a redirect via a Meta Refresh, then tracking access to that page with SiteMeter?
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jn
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 1:03 pm    Post subject: pages Reply with quote

with extreme, but yes, and the only pages that extreme will be set to track are those exit pages, so all it's reports are based on nothing but that outbound traffic.(data unpolluted by any inbounds) (and so represent over time a really great representation of outbound site traffic)
works nicely.
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jn
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 1:12 pm    Post subject: links Reply with quote

just as important to me was finding a way to track clicks while preserving real direct links. As you know, happy bloggers are those that have links inbound, if I killed everyones outbound links in order to track, it wouldn't be worth the tradeoff.
Additionally important was preserving the direct relationship between my domain and traffic sent to other blogs and services.
Those 3rd party trackers don't preserve that, so you might be sending a ton of traffic somewhere and they'd never know it was you.
This eliminates that.
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