Just checking to see if anyone has ideas on how to prevent a site visitor from re-viewing the "thank you" or "confirmation" pages on a site after they've ordered or filled out a form. Our tracking reports are showing these duplicate views & are skewing conversion #'s, etc.

This particular site posts about 30 fields to a custom perl script, so that would have to remain intact.

We've tried popups, redirects, etc... but nothing has worked as well as we'd like it to.

Any ideas or sites to look at?

What they are doing is viewing the HTML source, and you can usually see what the thank you page is, if it's been specified.

Some ideas would be, use a script that would let you specify the thank you page in the script rather than the HTML.

Or get something that will 'encrypt' HTML. This will stop the majority of the users, except for the experts. And odds are, the experts won't bother. I recommend searching for 'html encrypt' in Google. Try to find the most inexpensive program/script that gets the job done. Most of them do the same thing, so don't listen to the sweet talk.

Jonathan,
I'm not sure if you understood what I'm looking for...

Our problem is not that visitors can view the HTML code on the thank you pages, it's that they're viewing the page itself multiple times. This causes a problem, because we have tracking code on the page that creates a "transaction" within our tracking system. This "transaction" code allows us to track conversion rates from Search Engines, Pay-Per-Click campaigns and other marketing efforts.

We basically just need a way to prevent users from viewing the page more than once...

Hope that clarifies it...

Thanks for your response though.

OK, I don't completely understand but it might be search engines crawlers that are visiting your site, they check out all the pages. If it's not disallowed in robots.txt, then it could be that. Although it appears that you probably have it in robots.txt.

What I meant in the previous post was not about the thank you page html being viewed. Here's what I meant.

Ok, you have a page set up called form.html. It has all the fields to be filled out. Now one of the invisible fields might be the thank you page that it's supposed to go to.

So someone at form.html could view source, and copy & paste the thankyou.html URL into their browser and go to that page without bothering with the script.

This tracking code that creates a transaction ...

How does it do this? Are you using a backend database to store the tracking code or is it getting written to a flat file or is a counter simply being incremented or something else? It seems to me that the obvious answer is a simple database table into which you add a tracking code when the thankyou page is generated - a simple check to make sure you enter it only once in the database will mean that multiple views of the thankyou page will make no difference even if the user hits refresh all day long.

If this is way off mark as well then you'll need to clarify the stages involved in a person completing an order, your system generating a tracking code, and the thankyou page being displayed.