Ad clicking reports

[simon0t7]

I'm trying to figure out how often certain SWF/GIF banners are being clicked on a website. Does anyone know what the best way to track these clicks is?
I'd like a GPL third party script (since its less work for me) but I think the most efficient would be creating an Apache Log analyzer to see where people are clicking. Live tracking probably isn't the best idea as it'll consume more bandwidth then I'd like.

Any comments?

[Absolute]

If you know ASP or PHP then there's an easy way. Have the IMG source point to a PHP or ASP page that will record the image click in a database, than simply have the page print out the image/SWF to the browser. Or have an onClick Javascript event to take care of the tracking.

I'm not sure about third part tools, although I'm sure there are some out there.

[luthair]

if the links are leaving your site Apache won't be able to tell you how many times they've been clicked. In that case you could do something with PHP/ASP as mentioned by Absolute. If the page being linked to is on your server then you could track the referring pages in statistics

[simon0t7]

darn, I thought Apache logs would be able to follow something like that. We had a script like what Absolute was mentioning. Each day, it would make a new table and update as the links were clicked. The only problem was that it took forever to load after 4+ yrs of working! Probably need something that would update every day but log for a month archive itself and start again.