Linking to other site

[jen]

Hey you nice people how are you enjoying this not so nice and freezing cold weather!

Anyhow back to biz - if we have a link within our website to another website how would this website know that they're getting clicks from their ads/feature in our website (does that make sense, :? )

Do we have to have a special link/text from our website or just a straightforward link?

Thank you

Jen

[clairemackaness]

Most people have access to statistics (well I do anyway) that show where all the clicks have come from so they will see your site listed in their list of clicks

[mattk]

Usually the link on your site will go via some kind of script that will log what ad/feature the user clicked on, their IP address, the time they clicked etc. etc. so that the other guy can either log into your site and view the info, or be sent a monthly report etc.

The best example of this is Google AdWords, which off masses of data to allow people to manage their ads and calculate the worthiness of their investments.

[jen]

Thanks Claire and Matt,

So if lets say, from our site we've got a link for www.business.co.uk and when people visit our site and click on that link, will the business.co.uk owners will know that they've had clicks from our site? I mean how would they know, does it state our domain on their stats or something?

Jen

[jmds]

The link on your site could contain a referral code of some kind. When someone clicks on the link on your site it will pass the code to the other site. The other site would use the code in order to update a counter.

[TWD-Tony]

Thanks Claire and Matt,

So if lets say, from our site we've got a link for www.business.co.uk and when people visit our site and click on that link, will the business.co.uk owners will know that they've had clicks from our site? I mean how would they know, does it state our domain on their stats or something?

Jen

Basically yes, that's exactly how it works... A referal code will only come into play if you have joined an affiliate type scheme and you then you are given a special code to use so that the affiliate tracking system knows how many people you are refering to the other site.

[confused]

its quite easy if I remember righly, bit of asp something like this

you have just come from this website: <%=Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")%>

[Coding Monkey]

its quite easy if I remember righly, bit of asp something like this

you have just come from this website: <%=Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")%>

Yep, but remember certain browsers can now turn it off, so many times it might not appear at all.

You could just link to them like thus:

Secure Online Payments (http://business.co.uk/index.html?refer=ourbusinessname)

[DuaneJackson]

You could just link to them like thus:

Secure Online Payments (http://business.co.uk/index.html?refer=ourbusinessname)

But that's not going to be much use unless the target (business.co.uk in this example) are actively recording/logging the querystring 'refer'.

[Coding Monkey]

You could just link to them like thus:

Secure Online Payments (http://business.co.uk/index.html?refer=ourbusinessname)

But that's not going to be much use unless the target (business.co.uk in this example) are actively recording/logging the querystring 'refer'.

Sure it will. If they just use a REQUEST_URI on each page so see where the user is (or just look at Apache logs) they'll see where the user is.

[confused]

so you would need to log the visits, once you have a log of referrers, you can work out how many are coming from where

If that makes sense !


edit:
looks like posts crossed lol