If you’re looking for a good way to understand how information is being transferred to your computer from the web then I would recommend looking into the Charles Web Debugging Proxy. It can tell you things about how a site works better than just by observing with the natural eye. For example, I was looking into the way that Commission Junction handles the affiliate links that it manages and I found that Charles HTTP monitor very useful. By setting it to record while I was poking around I found that Commission does a triple redirect before landing you on the page of the advertiser. I also wanted to know the value of the document.referrer browser property. Would it be empty? Would it have the last redirect down as the referrer? Would it maintain the original referrer? Well, through viewing the information captured by Charles I was able to see a summary that answered all of my questions.

This is a very useful tool in connection with web analytics and JavaScript web beacons. You can learn the whole story of what is happening on the page load or even if some image request is fired off after the page has loaded.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 and is filed under Whatever, Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.