Hello. I recently bought an ad on a website and want to track how many visits/clicks I get from this ad each month. I was thinking that the "referring site" would show up in Google Analytics and/or AwStats when someone came to my site from clicking that banner. But this is NOT happening. I know there has been some traffic from this site - yet have seen no trace of their website in my referrers. How can this happen? Is it because of the way they have coded their banner redirect? How do I get around this and start capturing them as a referrer. As of now I have no real analysis on how this ad is performing. Thanks.
Are you running PHP on your site? Because then you can easily check the referral string and put it in a session variable
Yes... Running PHP. I'm currently checking the referral string like this: $strReferrer = $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]; But it's coming back as NOTHING for the hits that I'm fairly confident are from this banner.
in that case, you could just ask the site hosting your banner to just change the URL to http://www.yoursite.com/?ref=abc_site or whatever ref string you want
Yeah I guess I'll have to. But any idea why this referral string is blank? I'm assuming it's the same reason it doesn't show up in the stats software.
I don't really know to be honest. Perhaps they're directing the link through a redirect page. I can't say for sure
Click on the banner yourself and echo the referrer string to the page to check if its blank. Norton blocks referrer headers so maybe thats why some are not showing.