[thelist] tracking a url

Andrew Clover and-evolt at doxdesk.com
Tue Nov 4 11:51:37 CST 2003


Tom Dell'Aringa <pixelmech at yahoo.com> wrote:

> They suggested having a 'redirect' page that passes the link of the
> company ("companyA") the user clicked.

This is a common (albeit rather irritating) practice, yes.

> Is it me or is this really stupid? Shouldn't web trends be able to
> track that the above HREF was an exit link?

Not really, no. Only incoming hits are counted and available for the log
analyser to play with. An analyser like WebTrends can say what page was
the last thing a user viewed on your site (by using cookies and/or
Intelli-Guessing[TM]) but not whether that page was left due to a closed
window, followed link, or something else.

The obvious workaround is to run a log analyser on the companyA site and
see how many referrals you get from the main site.

> It seems to me this redirect page is unnecessary...

If Management insist on having the statistic without running log analysers
on the other sites, and don't care about the (minor) inconvenience it places
on users, I'm afraid something like this is necessary. There are a few other
ways to do it, for example having a plain link but with a bit of onclick
JavaScript that sends a request back to the main server through a web bug
or such.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/


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