If you are an online merchant, knowing which links bring you the most customers is even more important than knowing which ones bring you the most visitors. LinkTrakker's optional cookie tracking mode saves information on the user's browser, allowing you to read this cookie from your shopping cart or other e-commerce software.
Activating Cookie Tracking
By default, LinkTrakker's cookie tracking is not engaged. To activate cookie tracking, you will need to modify trakker-def.pl (in your LinkTrakker directory).
In the section labeled "User Toggled Settings", uncomment the following line (by removing the pound sign # from the beginning of the line):
#$ENABLE_COOKIE_TRACKING = 1;
Issues Regarding Cookies
For security purposes, web browser cookies are only readable by scripts running from the same domain name as the script which set this cookie. While LinkTrakker does not have to be resident upon your primary webserver, you must make sure that the cookies it sets are readable by the scripts that you want to have read the data.
In most cases, this means having LinkTrakker installed on your primary webserver or on the "secure" server that contains your e-commerce program. Please contact coders@radiation.com for more information about planning a cookie reading system for your particular needs.
Reading Cookies
While LinkTrakker writes the cookie to the user's browser, reading that data and providing reports on it need to be handled by your other e-commerce solution or custom programs. Reading cookies back from a browser are not really a difficult programming task: a Perl routine to find the LinkTrakker cookie (for example) would be as simple as:
my (@temp_list) = (split(/\; /, $ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'}));
my $entry;
my $key;
my $val;
foreach $entry (@temp_list){
($key, $val) = (split(/=/, $entry));
$cookies{$key} = $val;
}
if (defined($cookies{'REFERER'})){
$REFERER = $cookies{'REFERER'};
}
