Image Tracking

Let’s say you want to use LinkTrack to gauge traffic to particular web pages on your web site. Here’s what you do:

  1. Pick an image on your web site like this one: this one
  2. Make a LinkTrack link directly to that image like this: http://linktrack.info/36nq0en
  3. Use the tracking link in your image html like this:<img src="http://linktrack.info/36nq0en">and place it on your web page.

Every time your page is loaded, it will register on your tracking page! It’s no substitute for your server log files, but you can use it to track one specific web page rather than the site as a whole, or use it on sites where you wouldn’t have access to the log files.

If you were to use a smaller image like a transparent .gif or something that’s 1 pixel wide by 1 pixel tall, you would still get the tracking benefit, but the image wouldn’t even be noticeable.

Here’s my tracking picture in action:

See the tracking results at http://linktrack.info/track/36nq0en

Neat, huh?


This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Cool, Uses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Image Tracking”

  1. Michael Hall Says:
    January 10th, 2009 at 8:43 am

    This is very cool, i didn’t know it would still load the image, but i guess if your target tracking url is an image it works just as if you had set the src attribute of the image to an actual image address.

    thanks for this tip!

  2. Clicks Vs. Impressions - LinkTrack Says:
    April 27th, 2009 at 3:02 pm

    [...] any other action on the page.  If you’re after impression tracking, check out our article on image tracking.  Essentially, it’s just a matter of pointing your tracking link to a small image, and then [...]

  3. 1 Pixel Tracking Image - LinkTrack Says:
    April 28th, 2009 at 11:21 am

    [...] you need a 1px by 1px transparent tracking image that you can use for image tracking, you can use this [...]

  4. 404 Page Tracking - LinkTrack Says:
    May 6th, 2009 at 4:06 pm

    [...] always fun when you find another cool use for your own service! Today, I started using the tracking images on my 404 [...]

Leave a Reply