Tracking With A Pixel

There are times when you want to track the number of times a link to one of your own pages has been clicked, but you don't want to use any obvious "cloaking" or "tracking" style links. Now you can. of course, just go to your web logs and plough through the masses of data. But this can be very time consuming. Here's a better solution..

It uses a tiny invisible image on the web page you're going to track - and whatever tracking software that you use, such as "Cloak and Track". The image is a "transparent GIF" file, and web designers have been using this type of image for years, mainly to help in the layout of web pages. Here, we'll be using it for something completely different.

If you haven't got such an image, you can download a copy from here:

http://www.WebmastersCheatKit.com/single-pixel.zip

It's a single image "dot1.gif" inside a zip file. Extract it and upload it to some web space.

Now link the single pixel image somewhere on the web page you're going to track. If you've uploaded the image into "mysite.com/images", the HTML would look like this:

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/dot1.gif" width="1" height="1" />

It's not critical where you put it on your web page because nobody will see it, but I suggest that somewhere near the top of the page is a good idea. We're only putting the actual link in here as a place marker. We'll be replacing it in a minute.

Now open up your tracking software. I'll use "Cloak and Track" as an example here:

I've set "Cloak And Track" up to use the default folder: "www.iansuggests.com/LookAt". That's the first part of the section "This URL". It doesn't matter what you put in the second part, because no-one's going to see it. I've put "page1" in the example above.

In the box "Redirects to" you put the URL of your invisible single pixel gif. In this example, I've used the made-up URL: "http://www.mysite.com/images/dot1.gif". You then create your tracking link so that, in this example, "http://www.iansuggests.com/LookAt/page1" redirects to your invisible image.

Right, back to your web editor. We'd previously set the link to the image as:

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/dot1.gif" width="1" height="1" />

Just replace the bit in red with the redirect URL so that the link to the image now becomes:

<img src="http://www.iansuggests.com/LookAt/page1" width="1" height="1" />

Now, when anyone visits this page, it triggers the tracker and clicks up another hit.

This description has been rather lengthy. In fact, it's a very quick process.

You can, of course, using any tracking system you like. But it's very easy to use "Cloak and Track".

Oh, incidentally, there's a tracking link in this page! Can you see it? Of course you can't - it's invisible. But you've been counted :-)

I hope you've found this useful.