Posted by Good Man on 06/13/05 16:55

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?

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