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5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of TrackingMay 19, 2010  While most website marketers are tracking website referrals from search engines, as well as links from other websites and paid search advertising campaigns, a lot of visitors show up as "Direct Traffic." Do you ever wonder where they came from? I know that I do! I've talked about campaign tracking via Google Analytics before, so I won't bore you with the mechanics of how to create these links so they don't look ugly. But do read that article if you need a refresher course. After you have a good system in place for adding campaign tracking codes to your URLs, the most important thing you can do is remember to use them on everything! So here are 5 categories of links that you may not have thought about tracking, but should be:
Only with campaign tracking codes appended to any and all URLs can you quickly and easily know what media are bringing visitors to your site, as well as seeing what actions they take (or don't) once they get there! Jill --- Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, a Boston SEO Services Agency. If you learned from this article, be sure to sign up for the High Rankings Advisor SEO Newsletter so you can be the first to receive similar articles in the future! Read additional articles tagged as: Web Analytics Post Comment  Anonymous said: I do also want to track these, however, the less information I can give to google the better. Jill Whalen said: I don't think you'll win that battle, Anon. ;) Lauren said: Wow - what a set of AHA! moments I had while reading your article. I've so often wondered how to track in Google Analytics "direct" links to a website from things like printed brochures and email links. This was such a great posting. I even have an immediate use for this as I plan my son's school's integrated offline/online marketing campaign for next year's enrollment. And, as for the Barry's comment, I think when used in conjunction with exciting offers, the "yourdomain.com/whatever" would definitely be used. And that Google tool you referenced in the Measuring your Marketing article is a gem - I bookmarked that one right away. Thanks so much for sharing!!! Eric Fettman said: PRESS RELEASES, AND AN ALTERNATIVE TO CANONICAL Jill, our planets must be aligned. I just went over this with my colleague so he can include Google Analytics campaign tracking in all inbound links from our press releases. I also wanted to share a trick that should avoid potential duplicate content issues without the use of the canonical tag: append the tracking code to the URL using # instead of ? or &. Example below: http://www.mysite.com/page.aspx#utm_medium=pressreleases&utm_source=pressreleases&utm_campaign=theskyisfalling Google search engine ignores # and everything after, but Google Analytics still parses out the campaign tracking. Jill Whalen said: Interesting, Eric. And you're sure it tracks okay that way? If so, that's a great way to do it for links within your own site for sure! I will do a bit of testing myself. Glad you liked the article and that our planets are aligned! :) Eric said: Jill, two mea culpas here: 1) I have not used this method yet myself - just applying it now for press releases. 2) I left something important out: you need to add pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); to your Google Analytics tracking code Please see: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/02/04/setallowanchor/ BTW (this is a bit off topic for SEO), if you use Vertical Response for mass emailing, the Google campaigns codes (medium: email, source: VerticalResponse, campaign: name of your campaign) are automatically appended to links coming back to your website (or to going to anyone else's, I guess) in the final format of the email. This I definitely have seen for myself in my Google Analytics campaigns.) Sorry for not being more thorough and empirical in my original post - the last thing I want to do is to propagate incomplete or misleading information. Glad you're on top of it! Jill Whalen said: Thanks for clarifying that Eric. I'll check out that article when I'm ready to test it. Eric Fettman said: (Anonymous above is me.) Yes, I hadn't thought about applying this for links within site - great way to distinguish clickthroughs to same URL from two or more links on a single page. Jill said: Yeah, I had fixed your name up there as I assumed it was you by the content ;) Tom said: That is really some neat ideas for tracking.. I have recently placed code to track each of my daily blog posts on my desk top screen and each day I try to do something different in the post to beat out the competition for example I am in real estate and I post each new listing in the blog which is several posts per day. The trick is to try to take position 1 from the big dogs and have been quite successful... the tracking helps me see if minor changes have any immediate effect. Add Your Comments |
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I wholeheartedly agree with four fifths of this article, very good stuff. But I have to question the wisdom or practicality of tracking urls for offline advertising. I don't think people use them much, they either knock off the tracking part and go to the home page, or they forget them completely because they are too complicated. It's hard enough offline to get people to take a domain name on board, without also asking them to remember www.yourdomain.com/whatever
There is a time and a place for different urls. I think using a separate domain name for specific campaigns can work, but only really if they are supported by a lot of advertising. You also need to consider whether the loss of exposure for your primary brand url is a price worth paying for the tracking. As a general rule, I'd say if the specific url is directing the user to specific and relevant content for the campaign, then that's OK but use a different domain (which can redirect to a tracking url in your main site if you like). If, however, the only point of the url is to track the visitor source, and you are really sending people to your home page, then don't do it - you will weaken your advertising.