How to track affiliate clicks per user?

Question

I am trying to make a website which tracks links deployed on other sites by different users of my site, Kind of like:

I dont know where to start, I just need someone to point me in right direction. I see two ways with my little knowlage;

1) making a unique link like mywebsite/?id=userid&linkid=linkid for each user, get the clicker to my site, increase the specific click counter and redirect user to the required site.

2) Use tools like google analytics.

What should I do? where to take the start? Thankyou so much.

Answer 1

what you are looking for is something that is normally referred in affiliate marketing industry as "tracker". The basic idea is that you give some interface to your website registered users to create a link. This link will store the "reference url" and customerid (or customer website ID as each of customer website should be considered as affiliate Site with its own report of tracking). These two parameters are the basic parameters which will be be called, make a call to the database, update the counter and redirect to the url mentioned by the customer while creating the url.

Hope this helps.