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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