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Wusage 8.0 Manual
clickthrough.cgi: Watching Outgoing Clicks
It is often important to count the number of clicks on an
advertising banner or other link which points to an external
web site. The problem, of course, is that the user's web
browser obtains that page directly from the other web site.
As a result, the web server which contains the outgoing
link has no way of knowing whether it has been used or not.
One good solution is to use the provided clickthrough.cgi
CGI program on your server. To use this utility, place
clickthrough.cgi or clickthrough.exe
in A DIRECTORY ON YOUR
WEB SERVER WHERE CGI PROGRAMS ARE ALLOWED. Please consult your
webmaster if you do not understand this!
Next, access the URL of the clickthrough program.
You will be prompted to supply the URL you would like to
count clickthroughs to.
Enter a complete URL, such as http://www.boutell.com,
and click on the Show Me The Link! button.
The resulting page will show you the exact URL you should
link to in order to "click through" to the destination URL.
It will also show you the URL you should enter as a
pattern in the Items to be Charted (totalsgroup) option if you wish to count clickthroughs.
For instance, if you have installed clickthrough.cgi
in a typical cgi-bin directory, you will measure clickthroughs
to the URL:
http://www.boutell.com/
By linking to this URL instead:
For Those Who Are NOT Using Microsoft IIS
/cgi-bin/clickthrough.cgi/CT=http_3a_2f_2fwww_2eboutell_2ecom_2f
For Those Who ARE Using Microsoft IIS
/cgi-bin/clickthrough.exe?CR=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2eboutell%2ecom%2f
The clickthrough.cgi program instructs the user's web
browser to move on to the first URL, and the access to
the second URL appears in your web server's
log file, where it can be reported on by wusage in
many different useful ways. Most notably, the
^otion(totalsgroup) option can be used to graph accesses to a particular URL
over time. It is also possible to compute clickthrough rates
using this option.
VERY IMPORTANT MICROSOFT IIS NOTES
1. Microsoft IIS users must also turn
on the Keep Queries (URL after '?') (keepqueries) option
to ensure that Wusage considers the part of the URL after the
question mark to be significant.
2. The URL should NOT be escaped in the
pattern you write in your Items to be Charted (totalsgroup) option.
(Since spaces are not allowed in patterns, any spaces which are present
in the URL should be written as question marks.) Therefore,
you would write the pattern to match the URL in the example
above as shown below. Note that the colon and slash characters
are shown normally, instead of being escaped:
/cgi-bin/clickthrough.cge?CR=http://www.boutell.com/
"Why is IIS different?"
clickthrough.cgi takes advantage of a standard
feature of the CGI standard called PATH_INFO.
The idea is that anything that appears in a URL after the
name of the program itself is passed as input to the program.
Most servers still log the complete URL, so it can be
easily analyzed. Unfortunately, the IIS server does not
log the complete URL in this situation. This is why it is
necessary to use a different strategy and turn on the
Keep Queries (URL after '?') (keepqueries) option in
order to use the clickthrough.exe program with IIS.
We apologize for the additional effort required.
Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, Boutell.Com, Inc.
wusage@boutell.com
Boutell.Com, Inc - PO Box 16716, Seattle WA, 98116, USA
Phone/Fax +1 206 658-8176
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