Creating &quot;call home&quot; tracking

Creating "call home" tracking

Operandi

I want to add something like an <img src> tag to my customers HTML pages (with their permission) that picks up $_GET parameters and then posts them onto my server so that we can track, on their behalf, page impressions and how their users found them.

I can't just add PHP code snippets as most of their websites are in pure HTML and not PHP.

Is this possible? and how would I achieve this?

Thanks for your help

bubblenut

You have an image or link (header, <link... not an <a href) somewhere on their site which leads to your site, on your site you have a php script which catches it and processes it. Here's an example.

On their page, in this case the index page, we might put this tiny 1x1px image.

<img src="http://loggindsite.com/logscript.php?page=index" style="height:1px;width:1px;" />

Then in logscript.php
For this I'm assuming you have a MySQL table called page_logs with three fields (id, page, hitcount). There are a number of ways you culd set this up a little better, for example, if you're planning on logging for multiple sites you would need another field or if you discover you need to hold more information about the individual pages you would need to normalize to two tables (page_logs and pages) but this is good now.

<?php
$page = $_GET['page'];
//replace these with whattever your loggins/db stuff is
$con = mysql_connect($server, $user, $pass) or die('Failed DB Connect");
$db  = mysql_select_db($dbname, $con) or die("Failed to select DB");

$sql = "UPDATE page_logs SET hitcount = hitcount+1 WHERE page='".mysql_escape_string($page)."'";
$res = mysql_query($sql, $con) or die("Failed query $sql");

if(mysql_affected_rows($res)) {
  //didn't find the page
} else {
  //updated it
}

Operandi

Thanks for this help, which is definitely along the right lines, however can I pick up parameters on the page which contains the link using this technique?

So for example the client page is accesed by this url:

theirpage.com?param1=x&para2=y&param3=z

I want the link to pass these three parameters to my page on the remote server so using your example the URL would be this:

But I won't know what param1,param2 and param3 are.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

bubblenut

That would require either a change in the PHP on the site you're tracking or, if what determines the other parameters is in the url or something else on the page, you could use some javascript but that won't log screen-readers, spiders or other clients which don't have javascript.

Operandi

you could use some javascript but that won't log screen-readers, spiders or other clients which don't have javascript.

Yes you are right - it is probably a javascript solution. Browsers without Javascipt capabilities for whatever the reason, would have to be excluded.

Thanks for your help 🙂