I know some people are going to die laughing while reading this post… but… oh well.

I recently took over web development for a local company in my area. They run guide sites that are mainly for tourism information.

On the sites we have businesses that advertise with us and purchase yearly contracts for special ad listings.

The advertising is not sold online but rather through sales people who individually visit and sell to local businesses. One of the sales tools they use is to provide statistical data to potential advertisers… showing site traffic and our search engine placement. For existing businesses, they provide stats on how many times their page/website was viewed from our site from their previous ad buy.

Here is where it gets funny.

In order to collect site data, the previous web person decided upon a solution using iframes. Each and every advertiser we have has a unique iframe page that we track with webtrends, google analytics, etc… YES, WE HAVE HUNDREDS OF STATIC IFRAMES tracking this stuff for us.

When I came on board with the company and realized their approach to tracking data… I recommended that we switch to click tracking and get rid of all of those unnecessary iframes.  The problem is that upper management didn’t want to lose that selling tool until we have a years worth of data in another tracking system… so yes… we are still using these archaic iframes.

Here is where I am stuck. I want to institute a click-tracking solution that will start collecting data the right way… but at the same time I have to keep using these iframes for another year.

My question is two fold…

1.) What click tracking solutions would people recommend while using EE.
2.) I’m really close to these sites… can someone give me a big picture solution that is obviously much better that we could implement RIGHT NOW and rid ourselves of the iframes while retaining the iframe data. Yes, management wants the sales people to be able to use the iframe data (at least one years worth) until we have one years worth of other analytic data provided by a click-tracking solution. (PLEASE NOTE: They also DO NOT want the sales people needing to pull up two separate stat pages… say one for 6 months and another, with a new system, for 6 months… they want all stat data being displayed in one easy to read 12 month display. Thus the need to keep the iframes for now…)

My brain is just tired of thinking about this and I’m feeling like I’m too close to the project to see some OBVIOUS solution that is sitting right in front of my nose.

Could anyone be so kind as to point that solution out to me?  THANKS A BUNCH!

In the biz, page impressions are most often tracked by using an image tag.  When an “image” loads, it executes.  So you reference a script (e.g. PHP script) in an image tag on your pages, usually passing the current page as an argument to the invisible image. e.g.

img src=”/path/to/tracking_script.php?page=this_page.html”

If you need to track clicks, you most often have to go through an intermediary… lots of internet advertising uses these portals.  That stuff is done using Javascript… again, you’d be hitting some script with an argument specifying which link got clicked.

Yes, I am aware of how items are tracked. What I am most interested in knowing is how others are doing click-tracking with EE. I’m looking for great ideas and hopefully one will fit my needs nicely. Thanks for your comments.