|  | Posted by Malcolm Dew-Jones on 06/14/05 03:52 
Good Man (heyho@letsgo.com) wrote:: Hi There
 
 : A client of mine has some banner ads placed on the net.  Instead of relying
 : on the sites the ads are posted on tell us how many clicks they are
 : getting, we wanted to track the number ourselves.
 
 : I settled on using $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'] to determine what referred the
 : user to our page.  Sure enough, when testing, it all works (ie: i click the
 : ad on 'sample.com', which takes us to my page, and sure enough in our
 : tracking database i see 'sample.com' has had the visit count increased by
 : one.)  I am looking for the string "sample.com" to make sure that the count
 : goes up whether or not the person visited sample.com via
 : http://www.sample.com or http://sample.com/
 
 : My question is:  is $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'] reliable?  Essentially, a
 : place my clients have advertised with have said '80 people clicked your ad
 : this month' while our own stats show that only 15 people clicked it.
 
 : Is my method of tracking good/reliable enough to call them liars, or is my
 : method not too dependable?
 
 In addition to what others have said, if the pages are cached anywhere
 along the route (gateways and/or proxies) then you won't see all the
 traffic.
 
 
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