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
-
URL Formatting for Internal Link Tagging
After doing some research on internal campaign link tagging, I have seen conflicting viewpoints from analytics and SEO professionals regarding the most effective and SEO-friendly way to tag internal links for a large ecommerce site. It seems there are several common methods of tagging internal links, which can alter how Google interprets these links and indexes the URLs these links point to. Query Parameter - Using ? or & to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links. Since Google will crawl and index these, I believe this method has the potential of causing duplicate content. Hash - Using # to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links. Javascript - Using an onclick event to pass tracking data to your analytics platform Not Tagging Internal Links - While this method will provide the cleanest possible internal link paths for Google and users navigating the site and prevent duplicate content issues, analytics will be less effective. For those of you that manage SEO or analytics for large (1 million+ visits per month) ecommerce sites, what method do you employ and why? Edit* - For this discussion, I am only concerned with tagging links within the site that point to other pages within the same site - not links that come from outside the site or lead offsite. Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | RobbieFoglia0 -
URLS are top keywords in GA?
Hey Moz, For some reason on my father's website, michaelpadway.com, the top 2 keywords from organic are complete urls from his site. This doesn't makeugh sense to me. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | MarloSchneider1 -
URL String Tracking Question--Need help!
I am doing some research for a freelance project and found a URL receiving a decent amount of traffic from search with this url string after the normal page url (xxx.com/credit-card-counseling.aspx?match=e&query=debthelper.com&id=22097628847&id=1810807655) Is this some sort of GA tracking code? Why would it be used on that page to track organic search hits if that happens automatically? Would love some help figuring this out! Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | RickyShockley0 -
URL Re-Structure - Tracking success of it
Hi guys, I was wondering what would be the best approach to track the success of a URL restructure? What we plan to do is to implement the URL re-structure slowly by only having it on new pages which go live for property listings. Any previous listings will use the old URL structure. I thought it would be best to limit any potential problems by testing it on a smaller number of pages. So my question really is, what metrics should I be looking at to determine the success of this given the fact that we remove any property listings once they get rented or sold?
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkScully0 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0 -
WMT tools - setting parameter for redirected URLs
Hi everybody. One of our clients has recently moved from one ecommerce platform to another. During the move, a huge number of URLs have been tidied up to remove dynamic parameters. The old URLs have been redirected to the new, tidy ones. My question is whether it's worth telling Google in the WMT URL parameters section not to index the parameters of the old URLs. Will this affect the redirects in any way? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | neooptic0 -
Duplicate content? Split URLs? I don't know what to call this but it's seriously messing up my Google Analytics reports
Hi Friends, This issue is crimping my analytics efforts and I really need some help. I just don't trust the analytics data at this point. I don't know if my problem should be called duplicate content or what, but the SEOmoz crawler shows the following URLS (below) on my nonprofit's website. These are all versions of our main landing pages, and all google analytics data is getting split between them. For instance, I'll get stats for the /camp page and different stats for the /camp/ page. In order to make my report I need to consolidate the 2 sets of stats and re-do all the calculations. My CMS is looking into the issue and has supposedly set up redirects to the pages w/out the trailing slash, but they said that setting up the "ref canonical" is not relevant to our situation. If anyone has insights or suggestions I would be grateful to hear them. I'm at my wit's end (and it was a short journey from my wit's beginning ...) Thanks. URL www.enf.org/camp www.enf.org/camp/ www.enf.org/foundation www.enf.org/foundation/ www.enf.org/Garden www.enf.org/garden www.enf.org/Hante_Adventures www.enf.org/hante_adventures www.enf.org/hante_adventures/ www.enf.org/oases www.enf.org/oases/ www.enf.org/outdoor_academy www.enf.org/outdoor_academy/
Reporting & Analytics | | DMoff0 -
Phantom urls causing 404
I have a very strange problem. When I run SEOmoz diagnostics on my site, it reveals urls that I never created. It seems to combine two slugs into a new url. For example, I have created the pages http://www.naplesrealestatestars.com/abaco-bay-condos-naples/ and http://www.naplesrealestatestars.com/beachwalk-naples-florida/ and now the url http://www.naplesrealestatestars.com/abaco-bay-condos-naples/beachwalk-naples-florida/ exists in addition to the two I created. There are over 100 of these phantom urls and they all show a 404 error when clicked on or crawled by SEOmoz. Any body know how to correct this?
Reporting & Analytics | | DanBoyle760