Easy Outclicks A simple script to track which ads surfers click Freeware Version 1.1 Description This is a script which I've been using for some time to track out clicks. Out clicks happen when a surfer clicks any link on your site and then leaves. Normally these are not tracked and a script like this one is required to find out what it was the surfer clicked on. A common use of an outclicks script like this one would be to test out the effectiveness of an advert. Say you put an advert on your webpage somewhere - you could track it's effectiveness by counting how many times surfers clicked on that advert. If you then wanted to work out an adverts clickthrough ratio, you would divide the number of people who visited the page by using the formula: SURFERS WHO CLICKED DIVIDED BY TOTAL VISITS MULTIPLIED BY 100 Let's say 80 people visited your page and your outclick script reported 10 clicked the advert. Using the formula: (10 / 80 * 100) would tell us the ad had a CTR of 12.5%. A script like this can be used to test out the effectiveness of landing pages (especially in PPC search engine work), or of FPAs, or of the effectiveness of each kind of traffic - or from a traffic from a specific link list for example. Features • There's a test mode setting. • Handles long, complicated URLs. • Password protected clearing of data. • Easy set up. Working Example Imagine this is a link we're wanting to track: Example 1 Click on the link, and you'll end up at yahoo. Now look at this page: Stats Example This lists the URLs and the times they have each been clicked. Download & Installation It's probably a good idea on this script to read the instructions through in full once before doing the install. Download the latest version HERE. 1) Download the file to your hard disk. 2) Create a folder on your hard disk and unzip the files into it. You should have the following files: admin.php click.php settings.php test.html urls.txt 3) This script can be installed once per a domain, or in say a sub-folder within a mini site, or even once for each gallery. It's a small script which can be used as often as you want to test out clicks on different links. So you could make a free site in a folder on your domain like this: domain.com/lesbian-pics/ and then install this in a folder called clicks like this: domain.com/lesbian-pics/clicks/ just to test out the clicks from that site. 4) Open up settings.php in a text editor, and add in your own password, and the path on your webspace where urls.txt will be. 5) Open up urls.txt. This is the file which contains the urls you will be tracking. Each URL needs to be on it's own line in the text file. Look at the example urls.txt to see how the urls are shown. Each URL also has a descriptive word next to it. The script will use this and link to the url next to it. So each line has a word and then the url, and is separated by a |. This will make more sense after reading 'Linking Structure', below. 6) Create a folder on your domain where the script will run from. domain.com/clicks/ is a good one to use. 7) Create a folder in there called data, so you've now got: domain.com/clicks/ And... domain.com/clicks/data/ 8) CHMOD /data/ to 777. 9) Upload the following files to domain.com/clicks/: admin.php, click.php, settings.php and urls.txt Linking Structure Now the script is installed it's time to link to the script. Outclick scripts work by changing the way you link to a sponsor. Instead of linking directly to the sponsor, you sandwich the click script in between. The link from an ad goes to the click script, which then records the click information, and then bounces the surfer to the sponsor link. Here's how the links work in this script. <A HREF="click.php?url=yahoo">Fantastic sponsor here!</A> Look at test.html and see how the links are called there. Look at the url=yahoo bit. Now open up the urls.txt file and look at that. Remember the words separated by the | bits? This is how the linking is done. The link tells the script that this link is yahoo, and the script looks through urls.txt until it finds the line with yahoo on it. It then records a click for yahoo and then shows the surfer the link to the right of that yahoo text. yahoo|http://www.yahoo.com So whatever appears after the url= is the link which will be tracked and then visited but the surfer. Version Updates ... Version 1.1 April 4th 2004 Fixed a bug with the click.php script. To upgrade from an older version, download the .zip file and upzip it. Upload click.php over the old version. Enter Tom's Newbie Booster here More tips, scripts and help...