suggestion for placing tracking cookie just like google adword

Question

I have a contact us form in our website which would send out an email to the site admin when submitted. I would like to know from which site the user has landed onto this page and how many unique users have come here and such things... I have used Google Analytics but it sends out only information on the adword that the user has clicked. I would like to know from which site and from the user came in so that I can add this referring site when email is being sent to the site admin.

I am guessing that the referring site will always have some URL manipulation to redirect here so how can i grab that URL? or is there any other better way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Does the environment variable HTTP_REFERRER give what you want?

Answer 2

You can can begin collecting this data without adding any javascript to your Site's pages, using your server's access logs. If your server is Apache, then as long as you set your config file to record data to your access log in the Combined Log Format, then you are already collecting referrer (i.e., this is one of two additional fields appended to each line in the logfile when you specify the Combined Log Format versus the (default) Common Log Format, the other field is the user agent; both 'referer' and user-agent are taken from the respective HTTP request headers).

Another advantage of this method is that if you have been logging using the Combined Log Format, then you also have the data you want going back in time, as far back as you archive your logfiles.