Click tracking

[Maraschino]

I've been reading these threads here lately about shaving and sales and was curious what you guys would recommend to track your clicks to your sponsors

[TheSquealer]

Knowing how many people clicked a link isn't going to tell you much. There are many many many points of failure and you have to watch every single one of them if you want to know why sales are down for a particular day. Probably the single most important factor that no one mentions is slow page load times at someplace in the chain... hosts get attacked constantly... the sponsor, the billing page, your pages, your host, your tracking script (meaning your own tracking is slowing them down) etc etc etc.

Only an amateur, part time clown like the morons on this forum attribute their failure to each and every sponsor stealing from them.

[HomerSimpson]

I use http://yourls.org/, TALS and Bit.ly

depends on the project and what functions do I need

[Barry-xlovecam]

hyperlink on webpage -> Man in the middle (logging and redirect script) -> link destination.

Then, you need to sort out the real problems.

Accepts cookies,
has JavaScript,
Country,
date/time,
link location with some link identifier,
some user identifier (tokenize?).

Search: 'click tracking script' modify that or write your own.

The problem is counting apples:apples

I am assuming that you want to test each referral link's click out count with your sponsors' stats count -- but are you counting the same thing?

Click tracking your own website and a<=>b or more variable testing of its sponsor link placement would be more useful. Send traffic to sponsors that you trust (having good revenue and consistency (ROMI) for you is a good sign). Playing Internet Police is usually a waste of time -- find some winners and stick with them for as long as they produce results.

[seeandsee]

I use http://yourls.org/, TALS and Bit.ly

depends on the project and what functions do I need

I use yourls also for home custom tracking

[CurrentlySober]

i urinate on my links, so i can sniff them out later....

[Maraschino]

Yea its not specifically to sniff out bad sponsors. Definitely looking to test certain things, pages.

I havent had a chance yet to look at the suggestions above but with yourls, is there an admin section to change out links if need be (a program closes for example) and are the urls search engine friendly? I am off to check out the suggestions now. Thank you