I include a button on the splash page of every single one of my games that leads to my website if people want to purchase it.

Anyways I just installed a referal tracking script on my site, and I was wondering if anyone knows how to identify which webhits from people are coming from my games as opposed to spots on the web.

Im using the vitalize object in Multimedia Fusion to launch these pages. Anyone know how to pass referal information through that link so my script will identify it as a splash page?

Normally, all you can do is tell if they got there by clicking a link (referred pages) or if they got their through manual address typing or via a "favorites" collection (non-referred) which is what your game links likely show up as.

Ideally, figure out how to spoof the "referrer" data when your game jumps to your site. This may require doing lower level TCP/IP reads and writes rather than a higher level fire-and-forget web browser launch. Search for HTTP_REFERRER spoofing (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=HTTP_REFERER+spoof&fr=my_top) and you can learn (http://www.datatrendsoftware.com/spoof.html) how to do it.

If you can't figure out how to make your games identify themselves in the "referrer" data, then I'd recommend adding a #tag to help differentiate between the two. The tag can be at the top of the web page so there's no visual difference. The only problem with that is that the user can then bookmark it (including the tag) and it will look like a game access when they hit their favorites list.

John

How about using GET type html parameters? You know, the type that looks like:

http://www.bitbliss.com/buy?fromgame=gamename

Then have that specific parameter dedicated to your games (i.e. not from any other web page).

I use get parameters myself for all kinds of tracking, including ad-campaigns and similar. Just add something like ?source-class=demo&source=splash to each link you create pointing to your site. Then the request tracking code logs each request URL and there you go. Works like a charm and is really robust and easy to implement.

UNfortunately, I dont know how to write my own tracking scripts, and the one im using doesn't seem to pick up any urls at all from my games.

Does anyone know if a page redirect will work? Bounce users to a page on my site and then use javascript to forward them automatically to my index page?

Does anyone know if this would be an extreme hinderance for those people that are non-javascript enabled?

Even with the GET type parameters, you still have the problem of people using the in-game button, then bookmarking it with those parameters as part of their bookmark. So long as you don't mind the bookmark looking like it's a hit from inside a game, you should be okay.

John

Those of us who browse with javascript disabled are sadly accustomed to viewing the page source to figure out where the evil page designer was trying to send us. :) Since these pages are often completely blank for the javascript-impaired, it's not hard to figure out.

Of course, there's always the meta-refresh, or even just putting a link to the real page so that people who aren't instantly redirected can still get there. Which is much appreciated.

Proper redirection that should work on all browsers, if you have PHP setup on your server:

<?
header( 'Location: http://www.site.com/realpage.html' );
exit;
?>

Copy paste that into a file like fromgame.php and replace http://www.site.com/realpage.html with the page you want to redirect to. The only catch is that you cannot have whitespace before the opening <?, meaning <? should be the first two characters in the file. If you don't follow this rule then you'll get errors about headers already being sent.

This doesn't require JavaScript or support for meta tags, and suffers none of the drawbacks of those two. The redirect is also instant and you don't get the clicking redirect sound in IE.