tracking referrals?

Hi, hope someone can help.

I have an idea for a website but I cant figure out how to track referrals.

For example, I send people a banner, which they can place on their website or any other site to send visitors to my site. How can I track which visitors came to mysite who have clicked on one of those banners?. All I want to do is put a table on my site showing who has referred the most visitors. I dont really want to sign up to an affiliate program if I dont have to as I wont be paying anyone anything. Hope someone can help, it might be a simple way but I'm new to this

cheers

Paul

I have figured it out

Can you share your information?

Yeah sorry, I use statcounter and have realised I can see which site visitors have mostly came from. Like it lists them in order rather than just randomly showing you the last 100 visits etc. Thats all i wanted really. I have to pay a little extra as you only get to record the last 100 visits while its free, but it should do the trick

You can do this as follows;

Give a unique randomly generated identification code (this can be generated from PHP functions like md5 using yours partners email address as input). Now when you submit your text or graphical banner the hyperlink should have of the form


http://yoursitename.com/index.php?ref=parterner's_id

to track the referrer to your referred page should be either PHP or ASP type, when somebody clicks the link the "ref" variable will be passed to your site

Next you have to place the necessary code to store this id