PHP Redirector Counter for a link

Question

I need a way to count how many times a link is being clicked and I was thinking of creating a php script to redirect to and do the counting. Is there a better way to do this and how would i count each time the user visits the link and would it be best to save in the database somewhere...any suggestions

Answer 1

I would analyze your web log files as this will work whether it's a static page or a script.

If the page you need to count is a script, you could insert code that updates a table.

Website statistics is a big industry and there are many free and pay solutions out there to explore and get ideas from.

Answer 2

Yes, it must be a PHP script - JavaScript for example won't work all the time.

So - instead of a link to

http://some.site.com/page2.php

You would link to

http://some.site.com/redirect.php?page2.php

And in the redirect.php you will track, for example, in a database, the values, and in the end throw this header:

header("Location: http://some.site.com/".$_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"]);

To redirect to the path after ?...

// yeah - logs might work... a little bit more work, though and it is also very server specific.

Answer 3

If you need to track clicks on a specific link then you'll probably need to use javascript to capture the click and send a notification to a tracking server. If you need to track page views then you're best off looking at your server logs. Remember that a page can have many links pointing to it, you have to differentiate between link clicks events page page impressions. Another possibility, depending on your application, is to use Google tracking, or a similar third party tracking app.