URL offline advertising
-
Hi there,
I am in a bit of a dilemma, we are going to be doing some TV advertising and using the URL example.com/tv
I want this to take the user to the product that we are advertising example.com/product
For best practice should have a 301 redirect on /tv going to /product?
We are also doing magazine, newspaper advertising also, so the same question applies.
Kind Regards
-
Good point Keri,
Perhaps most important of all would be a nice big visible link to the product from the home page
Sha
-
Just a warning that not everyone will go to the /tv URL after seeing the commercial. I once distributed a couple of thousand postcards about our RC boat site at an even and got a nice spike in direct traffic, but fewer than 1% of the people actually typed in the URL listed on the postcard (it was /make for Maker Faire), they just went to the home page.
You'll want to make a note of some type in your analytics of when the ad is aired, as not everyone will go to the special URL, and six months later you'll want to know why you had a spike in direct visits to your home page.
-
Hi again Gary,
There appears to be various opinions out there suggesting as eunaneunan has said here, that Analytics will not register page loads via URL Redirects.
However, I personally work on a client site with more that 11,000 pages indexed in Google that are generated exclusively through the use of URL rewriting. Traffic on this site is reported in Analytics as with any other site. With this knowledge I would suggest that there should be no problem in tracking your page traffic through Analytics.
However, the obvious thing to do is to test it. Since the addition of a URL rewrite requires nothing more than the addition of a few lines of code in your .htaccess file you can put it in place, ask some people to click the link, wait 24 hours for the information to appear in Analytics if you don't have realtime analytics enabled and see the traffic is visible.
The other option you have available to you is to use a 302 (Temporary) Redirect. Once again, this requires the addition of some lines of code in the .htaccess file. The major difference is that a 302 redirect will be seen by search engines and also by the user - the URL will change in the browser when the Redirect occurs. Search engines will also see any change you make to the redirect in the future (for example if you choose to point it to a different product).
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Hi there,
Yes, the whole point is to track how successful the tv campaign is, so analytics is very important, and as you pointed out if the URL rewrite is used and does not give me anything in analytics then this is not suitable.
I do not want to create a custom page, I just want to take the user to the exciting product page plus track how many users are visiting example.com/tv
Any suggestions?
-
I think that if you use something like a htaccess redirect you won't get any analytics data as the page never gets a chance to load.
But is the whole point of the example.com/tv url is to see how successful the tv campaign was, why do you want it indexed? Just create a custom page in the same theme as the add then link to the section you want them to go.
-
Sorry, another question
the URL example/tv will I be able to see how many users have visited this page via Analytics?
Kind Regards
-
No probs...the Rewrite Rule goes in the .htaccess file.
Hope your campaign is successful
Sha
-
Just one more question if you don't mind:
The URL rewrite, where is this made? Server? On page? .htaccess file?
Kind Regards
-
Thanks very much for the tip
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
Yes, the experience for the user is exactly the same. Any request for example.com/tv will tell the server to load example.com/product.
This will solve your problem without any other issues.
Sha
-
Hi there,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes this makes sense regarding the 301.
The URL rewrite, if I understand correctly this will do something similar to the 301 where the user types in example.com/tv and is redirected to example.com/product ?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
A 301 Redirect should only be used if the change of URL is unlikely to ever be changed. One of the reasons for this is that a 301 Redirect also signals to Search engines that the originating URL should be de-indexed and replaced with the target URL.
Since you could conceivably wish to use the same advertised URL at some time in the future, but send it to a different product, this is likely to be problematic.
My suggestion would be to use a simple URL Rewrite Rule instead of a Redirect. URL Rewites basically tell the server to load the target URL when a request is received for the originating URL.
A URL Rewrite has no effect on Search engines and can be removed or changed at any time with no effect at all.
Hope that helps,
Sha
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Weird URL Structure in GA
Hey everyone, Thanks in advance for any insight on this. I've been researching it quite a bit on Google and haven't found anything yet. In Analytics, under our pages report, we're getting a lot of pages that look like this: www.execucar.com/https://www.execucar.com or www.execucar.com/https://www.execucar.com/locations/orlando-car-service Any thoughts on how to fix this? These pages don't exist...I'm at such a loss.
Reporting & Analytics | | SuperShuttle0 -
Page Tracking using Custom URLs - is this viable?
Hi Moz community! I’ll try to make this question as easy to understand as possible, but please excuse me if it isn’t clear. Just joined a new team a few months ago and found out that on some of our most popular pages we use “custom URLs” to track page metrics within Google Analytics. NOTE: I say “custom URLs” because that is the best way for me to describe them. As an example: This page exists to our users: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Ram_HD/2012/photos-interior/ But this is the URL we have coded on the page: cars-trucks/used-cars/reviews/2012-Ram-HD/photos-interior/ (within the custom variance script labeled as “var l_tracker=” ) It is this custom URL that we use within GA to look up metrics about this page. This is just one example of many across our site setup to do the same thing Here is a second example: Available page to user: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Cadillac_ATS/2015/ Custom “var l_tracker=” /cars-trucks/2015-Cadillac-ATS/overview/ NOTE: There is a small amount of fear that the above method was implemented years ago as a work-around to a poorly structured URL architecture. Not validated, but that is a question that arose. Main Questions: Is the above implementation a normal and often used method to track pages in GA? (coming from an Omniture company before – this would not be how we handled page level tracking) Team members at my current company are divided on this method. Some believe this is not a proper implementation and are concerned that trying to hide these from Google will raise red flags (i.e. fake URLs in general = bad) I cannot find any reference to this method anywhere on the InterWebs - If method is not normal: Any recommendations on a solution to address this? Potential Problems? GA is currently cataloguing these tracking URLs in the Crawl Error report. Any concerns about this? The team wants to hide the URLs in the Robots.txt file, but some team members are concerned this may raise a red flag with Google and hurt us more than help us. Thank you in advance for any insight and/or advice. Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | usnseomoz0 -
"index.htm" for all url's in google analytics
I don't have this issue with other wordpress websites, only this one website, and I don't know what's causing the issue: Google Analytics is adding an "index.htm" to every single page on the website. So it is tracking the pages, I see no errors - is it tracking the right page? When I click on the page link in a report, I naturally go to a "404 page not found" since the website address isn't "www.example.com/rewards/index.htm" - but instead the actual address would be:
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
"www.example.com/rewards/". I have navigated to View Settings in GA to insure "default page" is empty. Although adding anything else to this field does not effect the page url in analytics reports either. Could it be htaccess file - or a plugin effecting the htaccess file?_Cindy0 -
How can I remove parameters from the GSC URL blocking tool?
Hello Mozzers My client's previous SEO company went ahead and blindly blocked a number of parameters using the GSC URL blocking tool. This has now caused Google to stop crawling many pages on my client's website and I am not sure how to remove these blocked parameters so that they can be crawled and reindexed by Google. The crawl setting is set to "Let Google bot decide" but still there has been a drop in the number of pages being crawled. Can someone please share their experience and help me delete these blocked parameters from GSC's URL blocking tool. Thank you Mozzers!
Reporting & Analytics | | Vsood0 -
Why google stubbornly keeps indexing my http urls instead of the https ones?
I moved everything to https in November, but there are plenty of pages which are still indexed by google as http instead of https, and I am wondering why. Example: http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum correctly redirect permanently to https://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum Nevertheless if you search for pneumatici barum: https://www.google.it/search?q=pneumatici+barum&oq=pneumatici+barum The third organic result listed is still http. Since we moved to https google crawler visited that page tens of time, last one two days ago. But doesn't seems to care to update the protocol in google index. Anyone knows why? My concern is when I use API like semrush and ahrefs I have to do it twice to try both http and https, for a total of around 65k urls I waste a lot of my quota.
Reporting & Analytics | | max.favilli0 -
URL Parameters
Hi there, I have a magento sort by feature which has indexed loads of pages in Google with urls that have /shopby/ in them.Over 8k pages have been indexed like this. I cannot edit the robots within the page but have now disallowed the urls in robots.txt - i guess this will prevent new ones being indexed but not deindex current ones? So I looked into URL parameters, I added 'shopby' as a parameter in webmaster tools and told Google not to crawl any urls with this in it, will this deindex the pages already indexed? The only other way seems to be manually removing 8k urls, which i do not want to do. Any advice much appreciated. Obviously I do not want these urls indexed as they are weak/duplicate sort by search pages, I fear the panda update would not be too kind on it long term?
Reporting & Analytics | | tdigital0 -
My first campaign identidied long URLs
Hello! 🙂 I've just created my first campaign, and the crawling proccess have detected posts with long URL (more than 70 characters). If I change it, i.e., alter the URL's, can some problem happens to my blog? Or do I have to disconsider this problem and just "work correctly" from now on? Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Andarilho0 -
How to find out which URLs are NOT indexed on a site
Is there a way to easily find out which URLs on a store-type site are NOT being indexed in Google? For example, if my sitemap information in Google Webmaster tools shows I have 7342 URLs in my sitemap and 5699 of those indexed, how do I find out what the 1643 non-indexed URLS are? Thanks for any help!
Reporting & Analytics | | GregWalt0