Comments on: Tracking your file downloads

By: Andrea Nagar

Andrea Nagar — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:23:51 +0000

That’s a great tip Dennis. Thanks. It will allow for virtually tracking all downloads.

Have you got any tips on how to get the real downloads so that you take in account the download managers?

By: Dennis Crane

Dennis Crane — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:33:12 +0000

In download.php you may analyze referrer (e.g. getenv(”HTTP_REFERER”), $GLOBALS[”HTTP_REFERER”] or $HTTP_REFERER), user agent ($_SERVER[”HTTP_USER_AGENT”]), IP ($_SERVER[”REMOTE_ADDR”]) and your cookies that were set on other pages.

Usually download managers and bots may be recognized by user agent strings and by IP (e.g. regular daily downloads from the same IP).

By: NirD

NirD — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:34:37 +0000

Hi Dennis
Why are you only tracking downloads?
Why aren’t you using web analytics software (for example, Google Analytics)?
And if you are interested only in tracking downloads why aren’t you using the web server logs? This is faster and more reliable then any redirector script and you don’t have to write a single line of code (if the answer is that you don’t have access to the server logs, well, if you think tracking is king you should think about switching web hosts).

By: Dennis Crane

Dennis Crane — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:06:06 +0000

Nir,
I don’t say we track only downloads. We track everything This is just one of the techniques we use.
Web analytics software is often superfluous and raw log analysis also requires specialized tools or scripts.
PHP scripts built into the page code allows me easily track the standard ISV conversions: “visit(referrer)-download-order”. Plus, I have more control over my own scripts and data formats than over any third-party tool.

By: Andrea Nagar

Andrea Nagar — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:59:41 +0000

Hi,
I would like to use your code to track downloads using google analytics.
I tried injecting the standard Google Analytics javascript before the PHP redirect but I get an warning

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent

Is there a way around this?

By: Dennis Crane

Dennis Crane — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:19:58 +0000

You are not allowed to output any characters (e.g. GA code) before sending HTTP headers through PHP header() function. I.e. headers goes first, and then the rest output (HTML, txt, media) goes.