What is the most stable, least intrusive way to track web traffic between two sites?

Question

I need to track traffic between a specific set of web sites. I would then store the number of clicks in a database table with the fields fromSite, toSite, day, noOfClicks. The complete urls are unimportant - only web site identity is needed.

I've ruled out redirects since I don't want my server to be a single point of failure. I want the links to work even if the tracking application or server is down or overloaded.

Another goal is to minimize the work each participating site has to do in order for the tracking to work.

What would be the best way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

The best way is to use an analytics program like Google Analytics, and to review the reports for each domain.

Answer 2

You could place an onclick event on to each link that goes between each site. the onclick would then call some javascript which could do a server call back to register the click.

Answer 3

Do you have access to the logs on all of the sites in question? If so, you should be able to extract that data from the log files (Referer header).