Redirects and monitoring via awstats

[dficken]

I have a site that I am creating redirects for to monitor advertisements.

At the moment, I just set up redirects through the control panel / redirects option.

My question is... will Awstats/log file pick up the hit prior to the redirect or will it just display the endpoint destination in the log?

I am sure creating actual html files with redirects built in will register in the log... I just figured it was easier to use the redirect tool in the control panel. But I am worried the initial URL will not register in the logs.

If anyone knows, I would appreciate it.
Thanks,
Dale.

[dficken]

Looks like the raw log file registers the 302 redirect, so that is good.
I guess I will have to wait until Awstats reads that file to see if its processed in "pretty format". Otherwise, I will just do a grep count or something.

It looks like Awstats does not process current day log files since it is still being written to.
Does anyone know for sure?

[zenfort]

What I do for clients that run print ads - to track. Each ad has there one domain name associated with it. I create an addon domain for each domain. I reproduce the front page of the real domain to place in each addon (sub-domain), altering the links to point to the real top domain link destinations. Important: in each addon domain add a robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to index that addon domain, or else you could get penalized for duplicate content.

Doing the ad tracking this way give visitors the look of going to the real site while in reality they are landing on a different domain with links to the rest of the main sites pages AND awstats shows the hits for each domain AND the ads can run with a simple domain URL instead of a page link or a subdomain.