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I am trying to make a website which tracks links deployed on other sites by different users of my site, Kind of like:

MY required website

I dont know where to start, I just need someone to point me in right direction. I see two ways with my little knowlage;

1) making a unique link like mywebsite/?id=userid&linkid=linkid for each user, get the clicker to my site, increase the specific click counter and redirect user to the required site.

2) Use tools like google analytics.

What should I do? where to take the start? Thankyou so much.

Hamza Tasneem
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  • This is OT, but Google Analytics, or at least the Javascript Implementation thereof, is not a good affiliate tracking tool, a) because Javascript will usually not be available or fail for a number of users and b) because you have to allow (by Googles TOS) users to opt out from GA tracking. You cannot ask your your affiliates to be compensated based on a system that will almost by definition lose some data (and thus attributes fewer conversions than a proper serverside tracking would do). – Eike Pierstorff Mar 20 '16 at 14:30
  • Thankyou for the OT and reply sir.... Then what do you suggest? Make my own serverside script? Wont it have security concerns like bots and scripts auto clicking them? Any good source you recommend? – Hamza Tasneem Mar 20 '16 at 20:53
  • I recommend to ask at the approtiate site (SO is not a software recommendation site, you might want to try http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ instead). – Eike Pierstorff Mar 20 '16 at 21:36

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what you are looking for is something that is normally referred in affiliate marketing industry as "tracker". The basic idea is that you give some interface to your website registered users to create a link. This link will store the "reference url" and customerid (or customer website ID as each of customer website should be considered as affiliate Site with its own report of tracking). These two parameters are the basic parameters which will be be called, make a call to the database, update the counter and redirect to the url mentioned by the customer while creating the url.

Hope this helps.

usman zafar
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  • Thankyou for the reply Sir usman.... I had this option in mind though but I am concerned about the bots and script autoclicking the links. any suggestions on that? Thanks again. – Hamza Tasneem Mar 21 '16 at 18:33