March 03, 2008
If you want to be able to keep a track of which affiliate links or ads are working on your site then you need to be able to track them. When you know which links are being clicked on then you know what links work and what your visitors are interested in.
I recently started using Mark's Show your ad here service that allows you to manage graphical banner ads on your site. The ads on the right are the ones that I am testing. Whilst Mark's service is great and not forgetting free it doesn't provide and statistics so I have no idea how often the links are being clicked.
To add statistics for our banners we need to be able to ad some link tracking code. It just so happens that I have a very basic script in PHP that records clicks to a mySQL database. To integrate this into Mark's ad serving system I just replace my tracking code link as the target URL. Now every time the link is clicked this information is recorded and the PHP script forward the visitor to the target site.
Obviously you may not be able to knock up your own tracking script but you could use one of the many URL shortening services available or search for a free script from the likes of SourceForge.
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