How to track referrer back a few steps

[o hai guyz]

When I used to run Funmobile (lol) they always had some way of tracking what sites I was advertising on no matter how many steps back it was. Like I could have a banner on aaa.com which sent the user to a geo redirect at domain.com/redirect.php which sent the user to an lp at domain2.com/corresponding_country_lp.html which sent the user to domain2.com/check_artist_song.php which sent the user to domain3.com/sub_id.php which sent the user to the offer page. Then my AM would be like, "you're not allowed to advertise on aaa.com." The fuck?

I'm not asking how to get around this, I'm asking if I have a site and I want to be able to track the entire referral path of my visitors, how do I do that?

 

[uplinked]

This probably isn't some magic trick***, and more likely a factor of your visitors' browsers bringing the information along with them. Not sure about Meta redirects, but I know that when using a 301 redirect, different browsers behave differently -- Some use the URL of the originating page as the referer, some use the URL of the redirect, some blank the referer for redirects entirely.

E.G. If your visitor starts on aaa.com, clicks a link, is bounced 5 times, and still shows up at xyz.com with referer=aaa.com, it's probably because the browser did it. Swap in a phpinfo() file for xyz.com in your redirects, click it yourself, and see what the headers say. Try Chrome, FF, Safari and whatever's native on your OS to get a clear picture.

*** Disclaimer: There may be javascript hackery that I am not aware of