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Question about adding tracking pixels to themes

by E. Brian Rose
6 replies
This is not my expertise area, so I am hoping to get some good responses.

If you created web templates and wanted to track what domains these templates were being used on, what would be your best solution?

Thanks!
#adding #pixels #question #themes #tracking
  • Profile picture of the author Sour
    Tracking pixel wouldn't be a bad idea. I think that'd be my number one option, as it'd be really easy to create and the least obtrusive.
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    • Profile picture of the author E. Brian Rose
      Originally Posted by Sour View Post

      Tracking pixel wouldn't be a bad idea. I think that'd be my number one option, as it'd be really easy to create and the least obtrusive.
      What service would you use to track the pixel? I have found that most services that allow a pixel only tell you where the visitors came from and not where the actual pixel is embedded. What would be your solution to finding out what domains the pixel is being called into?
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      • Profile picture of the author Sour
        Originally Posted by E. Brian Rose View Post

        What service would you use to track the pixel? I have found that most services that allow a pixel only tell you where the visitors came from and not where the actual pixel is embedded. What would be your solution to finding out what domains the pixel is being called into?
        I would probably just code it myself .
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  • Profile picture of the author dvduval
    You could use a url shortener and obfuscate the url as well. But I think if someone wants to get around it, they will do it anyway.
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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    This is probably the wrong forum for this discussion (this is more like Programming or Web Design) but I would do this - just my preference. Get Arash Dejkam's FANTASTIC free PHP stats package - TraceWatch Web Stats - FREE Advanced Traffic Analysis. I have been using this since I started in web biz 4-5 years ago and I love it because you can see EVERY visit, nothing gets missed because it's PHP-based. BTW, really useful if you have just set up a new site and you really want to see every single individual visitor in detail, so you can monitor how your promotional efforts are going. Only catch would be if you are getting like a few hits a second or something, then you might have problems. I would implement it like this:

    1) Set Tracewatch up on a domain you own
    2) Create a blank PHP page on the same domain which merely includes the Tracewatch include code (see the site for all that explanation)
    3) create my img src in the theme as a link to that blank page, and bingo, you can have all the stats you want at your fingertips.

    That's one idea, I bet there are plenty of others. You could probably do the same thing with Google Analytics, but I don't like the way it reveals itself in the status bar on the browser.

    Good luck - I did a similar thing with a Wordpress plugin I wrote. It was kind of fun seeing where my plugin was being used! (and felt kind of illicit too!)
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  • Profile picture of the author profitsforall
    Have a php or perl script on your server that outputs a blank gif.
    (pretty simple just outputs the content type of gif and then the data).
    In this script it can also take the HTTP_REFERER variable that is set and write that to a database of your choice or to a text file. (You could eradicate duplicates quite easily).

    One problem - depending on where you put this tracking pixel it wil appear on every page navigated to, resulting in a call to your server each time.

    I can think of another way - a local php script (local to the server with the theme) that calls your server and gets the invisible gif - passing across a variable with the domain name in it (another envronment variable could be used for this. it only does this if a file of a specific name doesn't exist. Once it's made this call it writes a file of a specific name. Therefore never calling your server again.

    Sorry for that brain dump.
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