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2 TRACKING OUTGOING HITS
2. 1 PLACING A LINK TO RB4
In order to track outgoing traffic, you will need to use RB4 links instead of the regular ones. Here is how it works: You place a link to RB4 script
cout.cgi. When a visitor clicks on the link, RB4 will add a record about the visitor and redirect to desired location. You may control the location by suplying cout.cgi with a set of codes-parameters. Here is a sample outgoing link:
http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/rb4/cout.cgi
 IMPORTANT:
You should make sure that your outgoing link cout.cgi is on the same
domain as the page where the tracker code has been placed (including subdomains).
domain.com and www.domain.com are different domains! If your outgoing link is on a different domain, no productivity stats will be recorded.
That is why we recommend you to use relative links on your website. Relative links
are the ones that do NOT start with http://.
2. 2 OUTGOING LINK COMMAND SYNTAX
| EXPRESSION NAME |
EXPRESSION VALUE |
| FULL URL |
cout.cgi?<COMMAND LIST> |
| COMMAND LIST |
<COMMAND>[**<COMMAND>]... |
| COMMAND |
<NAME>=<VALUE> |
| Below are all valid COMMAND NAME/VALUE pairs that can be used with cout.cgi |
| COMMAND NAME |
COMMAND VALUE |
| url |
<URL> |
| gll |
<GALLERY PERCENTAGE>|<URL> |
| link |
<STRING> |
NOTE:
- Strings in [ brackets ] are optional.
- All name / value strings are case sensitive.
- URL can be any valid url that does not contain the ** character sequence. |
2. 3 LINK COMPATIBILITY
RB4 is compatible with any links that do not contain ** character sequence. You can use RB4 to send traffic to other sites, gallery pages, sponsors etc. Using link as a URL encoded form output is also allowed.
IMPORTANT:
Webmasters often get mistakes when using WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Macromedia DreamWeaver.The error occurs because some HTML editors tend to replace special characters like (**) into URL-encoded form.You should either configure your editor not to perform these replacements or fix the code manually.
2. 4 COMMAND DESCRIBTIONS
| COMMAND NAME |
COMMAND DESCRIBTION |
| url |
Redirects to the specified URL. URL string is parsed and outgoing hit for extracted domain is logged. |
| gll |
Redirects specified percentage of traffic to gallery URL. The rest of the traffic is being sent to a trade. Trade can be chosen automatically by RB4 or specified exactly with url command. A hit for gallery domain is logged. |
| link |
Writes the specified string into RB4 LOG file as link name |
2. 5 EXAMPLES
cout.cgi?url=http://www.domain.com
cout.cgi?url=http://www.domain.com/any/path/anypage.html
cout.cgi?url=http://www.domain.com?any=1&form=1&input=is%20ok
cout.cgi?gll=80|http://www.galleryhost.com
cout.cgi?link=NAME1
cout.cgi?url=http://xxx.com/**gll=70|http://gll.com/**link=name2
RB4 will track all the outgoing traffic that is being sent using cout.cgi script. RB4 will NOT track any
hits sent by regular links. Each hit will be recorded as soon as HTTP connection to the server is established by the visitor. RB4 should NOT
be responsible for the correct traffic logging on your partner site!
IMPORTANT:
It is possible that your trade partner will see lower incoming stats than you see outgoing.
The stats are usually different by ~15%. If the difference is more than 20%, there is most probably a problem.
Why is there such a big difference in numbers? Most scripts would use HTTP_REFERER CGI environment variable to track incoming traffic.
That is also what RB4 does. Not always this variable is being set properly by the server. To be more exact, not all browsers work the same way
and not always they send the same kind of HTTP Request headers to the server. If a browser does not send Referer header, your partner
will not know that the current visitor comes from your site. He would most probably think its a bookmark.
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