tracing mouse clicks on website

Question

I am new to website designing and wanted to know couple of things.

1. when some clicks on the link on my website say www.google.com, can i trace that how many people clicked on it.
2. When i send out emails with attachments, can i record how many people opened those attachements. btw this is not yahoo or gmail, its my personal email with an ISP.

if so, please put references so i can read them or explanation if possible

Answer 1

Create the links on your website so that they do a GET to your website first, and then redirect to the desired website.

<a href="mywebsite.com?linkto=google.com">Click here</a>

The email attachment is a different problem. If you send an email that reads the attachment from your website, you can record the traffic.

Answer 2

• For tracking outbound clicks, services like Google Analytics can wrap every link on your site with JavaScript and provide statistics and sexy graphs.

• For tracking email attachments, it depends on the attachment. Static files like images can't make callbacks to the Internet, but something like a PDF with embedded JavaScript might be able to.

• As for links within the emails, you can make each link in each email unique by associating a token with each email recipient, e.g. <a href="http://mysite/page?referrer=e635f56f7dea051c1838a443e065899a"&gt;Some Link</a>. Store the token in a database along with the recipient's email address and later you can cross-reference hits on your site with emails you sent out.

I know there are a handful services that do the latter, but I can't name any offhand. Search for "email newsletter service."