Tracking clicks of visitors

[jaymoore_299]

I want to make a script that will track where someone came from originally when they first came to the webpage, and how many times they clicked on the links on my page on average, so basically the productivity of clicks based on the referer.

For example if someone comes to my website through website A, they clicked an average of 10 links, as opposed to those from website B who clicked on an average of 20 links.

Would I need to use cookies in order to do this? I'm thinking that once they reach my webpage and they start clicking on links the http referer will be reset to my domain so that I won't be able to tell where they came from.

[johanafm]

Yes, HTTP_REFERRER only carries information about where the latest action, which would mean your site after the first page request. However, you can't rely on it to always be set.

And yes, you need to somehow keep track of your users while they're on your site. You could set a cookie for this purpose, but since cookies arent always allowed, it won't give you 100% coverage. You could also go for sessions with session id being passed around in the query string. From a security perspective, this isn't that good, but if all you need is tracking information, that shouldn't be an issue.

[dagon]

Google Analytics is a popular solution for this