I would like to track the clicks on a banner ad that I am going to place on someones site. Is this possible and how would I do this?
It's possible. For example, you could track clicks on banner ads with PHP and MySQL. You said you'd need to do this on someones site, if you have access to their files and DB, you could do it like this: 1. You'd need to put information about banners to a database. At least table with ID (will be auto-generated) image (the image you want to use as a banner) url (where clicking the banner will actually lead you) clicks (the tracking part) fields I can think of. Perhaps something else too, you probably know better. 2. Once banners are in the database, you can call them with a simple PHP script. Depending on what you want, you can write a script that shows the first banner, the last banner, a banner with specific ID, a random banner etc. In essence, write a script that connects to the database, fetches the avobe table and shows information about it. 3. Now the site is dynamically showing a banner you want, but it's still not tracking clicks. You can achieve this by replacing the link in your banner (<a href> in HTML, not the url field in DB) with a link like yourdomain.com/track.php?id=X, where X is the ID of the banner fetched from the database. You'll then need to create track.php that does 2 things: Increments the value of "clicks" field of the said banner, and then redirects the visitor to the address as specified in the "url" field. Now when your visitor clicks the banner, track.php will fire up and will write the click to the database and redirect the user wherever the banner url from the database points. Hope this helps.
Do you really think he knows how to do all that?Short version like i replyied in hes other thread, just use bit.ly to shorten the link and check on bit.ly how many clicks you got.Easy as that.
That's a very elegant way to do it indeed. Though for more complex click tracking with features like IP address and timestamp I'm not sure how capable bit.ly is of. With PHP+MySQL solution those features are easy to implement.
Yes indeed for more indepth reports what you are saying makes sense.But i think our friend here just wants to keep track of how many clicks he gets and thats it.Plus coding is not something that everyone knows.Great input neverless.Cheers!
No I just want to know if I create a banner and pay someone to put it on there site. I would like to see if the banner is getting noticed and a good way to tell if it is , is if it is getting clicked on. So how would this work in bit ly?
You take your website "www.blablabla.com" , go to bit.ly and shorten it ,then insert the shorten link into the banners code.Simple as that Or whatever link you want the banner to take the visitor.
The simplest way is to get a plugin like "pretty link lite". This will enable you to create a unique URL. The unique URLs created with such a plugin will also enable you to determine exactly how many unique clicks your link generated. NOTE: Of course you require wordpress for this plugin, also consider that for each banner you create, you should create a unique URL. (Because if you generate one URL and promote on different websites, you won't have a method to see where the hits came from. So isolate your URLs with each ad buy you place. Hope that makes sense).
If you have some knowledge of programming I suggest you to use php+mysql to tracking banner accordingly to akselsson said. Programming can do anything you want to track.