Easily track your links with this creative trick

Virtually anyone who offers web services also provides some form of tracking mechanism in the basic cost of the service. And these utilities usually include a method for determining the domain the viewer came from. This is good information to have, especially when you're buying banner ad space from other websites. But what if you want to test a couple of different banner ads on the same site? How would you distinguish between a hit from banner ad #1 and a hit from banner ad #2? Simple—a single question mark.

For example, let's say you've launched a marketing campaign on www.elijournals.com that you want linked to your site, www.itsmydomain.com. However, you have a couple of different banner ads that you'd like to test. To track which banner ad the viewer clicked on, you could use expensive traffic monitoring software, or you could simply have one banner ad link the viewer to www.itsmydomain.com/index.htm?bn1 and the other banner ad link to www.itsmydomain.com/index.htm?bn2. The secret here is that the viewer's browser ignores the question mark and anything after it, but your web log doesn't.

To prove it to yourself, launch your web browser and hit your front page a few times, each time appending the URL with ?test. Now, when you review your web statistics, you'll notice a few hits came from yourdomain? test. The cool thing about this trick is you can include as many codes as you like—as long as they're preceded by a question mark.