How Do I Fire A Tracking Pixel With A PHP Script From The Shell Without Anyone Being On The Site?

How Do I Fire A Tracking Pixel With A PHP Script From The Shell Without Anyone Being On The Site?

I have tried hitting a script with just the pixel in it with wget, and lynx but I cannot get the pixel to fire because for it to fire it "has" to be displayed in the browser.

It's just a standard image pixel, or iframe pixel given to me by a affiliate network.

I know other affiliate networks have this capability, to fire a pixel without a person being on the website - but I j开发者_StackOverflowust can't seem to figure out how to do it.

Any suggestions?

From the comments

Sorry guys, trying not to be shady. In the payday loan space, there are many networks that use a pingtree, and fire the pixel only when a certain sales amount threshold is hit. This is above board, no trickery involved. it's called the bucket method. A virtual bucket is put in place, and money gets thrown in it, when it reaches a certain dollar amount the pixel is fired and the bucket resets to 0.00

The browser loads the HTML, parses it and then loads all images. You just get the HTML and nothing else. You should get the pixel too.

But If this is too fool someone, most trackers will keep track of IP addresses, so all your views will probably count as 0 or as 1, or you'll get real trouble with your affiliate.

because for it to fire it "has" to be displayed in the browser.

Fetching the image with wget will work.

Whether it gets displayed in the browser or not does not matter for an image resource.

Maybe the site serving the pixel has means in place to prevent automatic fetching.

Can't say for certain, but the problem might be the User-Agent. The affiliate probably only fires it when the User-Agent is a legitimate browser. Wget probably has its own User-Agent string. Try hooking up Fiddler or WireShark when you make a real request in the browser. Then you should be able to replay the HTTP request manually via php (or any language).

it was as simple as

wget -r url

I haven't tested on iframe though, but it did work for image pixels.