So, for a site im working on I would like to track stuff as detailed as possible - One of the things I would like to track is referer information, specifically, keywords from search engines - I already have a script that parses the keyword out of the referer string but I need to figure out how to pass that information along to another page... I know I can do it by throwing it into the URL and using $_GET vars but I dont want to do that because theres something I dont enjoy about having "some-long-keyphrase-here" in the URL of the page... I also dont want to use forms to pass it in a POST variable... So my question is, has anyone ever used sessions to pass information like referer keywords, date/time, etc to another page to be inserted into a database? Is there any downsides to doing this?
Sure, you can use session variables for this, there aren't any downsides at all. Code will look something like: $_SESSION['keywords'] = string containing your keywords; You can then access $_SESSION['keywords'] on any other page of your website, but don't forget to include session_start(); at the top of all scripts.
I know that referrer information is easily spoofed and set by the browser - But for what im doing it will be fine...