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Inspiring
September 3, 2008
Question

is there a way to track how many times a link is clicked?

  • September 3, 2008
  • 4 replies
  • 1133 views
Hi,
I've been looking around the net for CF scripts on how to track how many times a link is clicked. I couldn't really find anything that was out there to help me with the problem.

Does anyone know how to see how many times a link is clicked on? I just want to see how many times a link is clicked on compared to how many leads are captured so I can see how well our forms are doing?

Please let me know if you have any information on click tracking with CF.

Thank You

Derek Bess
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4 replies

Participating Frequently
October 6, 2008
thanks for information
Inspiring
September 3, 2008
Do you want to know how many times a specific link has been clicked on, or
do you want to know how many times the target page has been visited?
They're two slightly different things.

The former measures how many people actually clicked a hyperlink on "page
A", which links through to "page B". It measures how good "page A" is at
directly people to "page B".

The latter just measures how many people visit "page B" (which could be
from a link on a page other than "page A", like a search result in Google,
or another site pointing to "page B" or a stored bookmark or something.

The web server will already be tracking every page that gets visited, so
there's nothing special you need to do if you're just wanting to see how
often "page B" is visited. Just parse the logs.

If you are really interested in the link on "page A", then there's a chance
the web server can also be set to log the REFERER for any request, in which
case all you need to do is to set that and then parse the log file.

If it cannot do that, then you can stick some code on "page B" which stores
the referer value of the request (eg: in a DB table), and subsequently
analyse where the referers came from, and whether it was "page A".

--
Adam
tclaremont
Inspiring
September 3, 2008
Put a database insert on your initially linked page, and then, further down the page, a CFLOCATION to the ultimately desired page.
Inspiring
September 3, 2008
link to a cf page that updates something and cflocates to the page the user thought he selected.

The downside of this approach is that an attentive user might see something unexpected in their status bar.
Inspiring
September 3, 2008
what's the method of achieving this though? Perhaps coldfusion isn't the way to go with click tracking. Perhaps there is software out there that can track the clicks like Google does with adwords?