06

MAR

Create a php click counter

by krike in PHP, Tutorials

In this tutorial I will teach you how to create a simple php counter to track how many times your banners were clicked

Author: krike

I'm an enthousiast web designer/developer who's trying to learn as much as possible and likes to share his knowledge with others.

Since my deposit/advertising script was approved on the envato network (codecanyon.net) the first request I received was to create a click tracking to see how many times a specific banner was clicked on. In this tutorial I will teach you the basics of creating such a click counter.

Example of the click counter of the deposit script

deposit click counter

The database

Let’s start by creating a new database called counter and execute following queries

CREATE  TABLE  `banners` (
 `id` INT NOT  NULL  AUTO_INCREMENT  PRIMARY  KEY ,
  `url` VARCHAR( 150  )  NOT  NULL ,
  `banner` VARCHAR( 150  )  NOT  NULL ,
  `name` VARCHAR( 60  )  NOT  NULL, 'clicks' INT NOT NULL DEFAULT  '0'
) ;

Let’s insert some data now

INSERT INTO `banners` (`id`, `url`, `banner`, `name`, `clicks`) VALUES
(1, 'http://themeforest.net', 'http://envato.s3.cdn.plus.org/referrer_adverts/tf_260x120_v2.gif', 'themeforest', 0),
(2, 'http//graphicriver.net', 'http://envato.s3.cdn.plus.org/referrer_adverts/gr_260x120_v4.gif', 'graphicriver', 0);

Configuration of the database

Let’s start by creating all of the nescessary files for this tutorials. Create 3 new php files, name them index.php, config.php and counter.php

Paste the following code into config.php to make the connection to the database, this you will need to display the banners and to track the clicks

note*: I’m using mysqli and not regular mysql, you may need to pay attention to this because the parameters for the sql query and the link to the database is different when using mysqli.

<?php $db_host = "localhost";
$db_username = "root";
$db_password = "";
$db_database = "counter";

$link = mysqli_connect($db_host,$db_username,$db_password) or die("Cannot connect");
mysqli_select_db($link, $db_database) or die("Cannot select the database"); ?>

Make sure to fill in the right username, password and database name before you continue

Display of the banners

Open index.php if haven’t allready done so. Let’s add the basic html structure:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <title>banners index page</title>
  </head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Above the doctype let’s include the config file and query for the banners

<?php
include("config.php");
$sql = mysqli_query($link, "SELECT id, url, banner, name FROM banners");
  ?>

Now we need to fetch the queried data and display each banner from our table, so between the body tag add the following code

<div id="container">
<?php
while($result = mysqli_fetch_object($sql)):
    ?>
    <p>
    <a href="counter.php?id=<?php echo $result->id; ?>">
    <img src="<?php echo $result->banner; ?>" alt="<?php echo $result->name; ?>" />
    </a>
    </p>
    <?php
endwhile;
?>
</div><!-- end of container -->

Now browse your index.php, If everything works fine you should have something like this:

banners index page

Now the trick is in fact to link to the counter.php and pass in the id of the banner as a parameter (eg: counter.php?id=//id of the banner), which we allready did (see previous code). We then run a query to increase the click with 1 and then we redirect the user to the correct url.

Track click and redirect

Open counter.php and add the following code

<?php

//1. include the configuration file
  include("config.php");

//2. Get the id from the url and store it into a variable
  $id = mysqli_real_escape_string($link, $_GET['id']);

//3. fetch the url and clicks from this banner
  $clicks = mysqli_fetch_object(mysqli_query($link, "SELECT url, clicks FROM banners WHERE id=".$id.""));

//4. increase clicks with 1
  $new_click = $clicks->clicks+1;

//5. update this into the database, check if it was succesfull
  if(mysqli_query($link, "UPDATE banners SET clicks=".$new_click." WHERE id=".$id."")):
  //6. redirect to the url
  header("Location: ".$clicks->url);
  else:
  //6. else write to error log
  endif;
?>

so let’s go over each line

  1. 1. Include the configuration file
  2. 2. Get the id from the url and store it into a variable
  3. 3. Fetch the url and clicks from this banner
  4. 4. Increase clicks with 1
  5. 5. Update this into the database, check if it was succesfull
  6. 6. Redirect to the url else write to error log

Conclussion

There you go in only a few steps you were able to create a click tracker to keep track of how many times your banners were clicked on your site. If you don’t want to spend to much time coding the click tracker yourself you might be interested into the deposit/avertisement script at http://codecanyon.net/item/deposit-system/59753

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