Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have a client that wants to put his ad on my site, and he will pay me for click-throughs from my site.  It`s too low a volume to be worth manually looking at the number of clicks on his button.  Does anyone know of a cheap source of a PHP or JS program that would automate the count for us?

I had thought of using a counter page - his button would go to a page on my site with a visitor counter then forward with no delay to his site.

Ideas would be welcomed.

Thanks
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video



-------------------------

Steve Mann
Internet Videographer
MannMade Digital Video
My Email

Hello Steve.

Check out this free open source ad server software product called `OpenX`. Ad server software is what companies like Google and Internet advertising companies use to serve ads; it`s just a different software product. It tracks clicks, inventory, and so much more for each ad size, type, location on a page, domain, client, etc.

I installed an earlier version several years ago for preliminary testing and it was very powerful back then. It was also designed to integrate with other open source products like CMS, etc.  I really liked it.

I heard this one is much better as it is a much more mature version and compilation of features taken from their earlier ad server products. Without doing any recent research on this, I believe these are the same original developers.  Back then it also had a strong community which I believe is even bigger and stronger now.

If you went forward with this, you may want to consider serving ads on other websites as a service offered by your business.  It would probably generate a nice income stream.

HTH



-------------------------

International Business Network, LLC. (IBNETLLC.com)

* Buy Web Traffic (100% Human Targeted) at...
The Advertising Wall (.com) | VisitorsGalore.com
* Add Your Website Link to the LinkToUs.net Directory! (SEO backlinks)

Other Resources:
* Website Traffic Repair (.com)   |  * Health Care Statistics (.org)   |   * Cardio Workout (.tv)

It would take about ... 10 minutes to write a php program to do this. You could rewrite the link to count variations and whatever else you wanted too. Basically the link from the ad is something like yourdomain.com?ad=addname and then it puts a timestamped entry into a database with every click.

The other thing I can think of is using Google analytics on a redirect page, but I`m trying to think if the script can load before the head/redirect ... I might have to tinker with that to know if it works. I think you can run the script and then put the redirect in the head right after it ... I could email you the code if you want it.

Thanks both of you.  I will check out OpenX.
ThatPHPgirl - nice play on words...  I like it.  Yes, it would take only a few minutes to do this in a PHP program.  Maybe it`s time to break out the PHP and MySQL book and jump back in.  I was a software engineer in a previous life (starting way back in the 6502 and Z8 days) and there is really no excuse for me to not have kept up with PHP programming.

The hit counter does work for now, but it`s kludgy and all manual.


-------------------------

Steve Mann
Internet Videographer
MannMade Digital Video
My Email