Ever since the early days of the internet, webmasters have wanted to know how many people click on the links on their site.
In the early days, I used (and on some sites, still use) a simple Perl script that handles a very simple redirect and logs when the clicks were made and where they went to.
The script is very basic and doesn’t get over the biggest bugbear of most webmasters: the links look ugly when you hover over them and check what appears – usually at the bottom of the browser screen.