Root domain or 'www' subdomain for campaigns?

[turnbullholdingsltd]

I am setting up a campaign and I am unsure whether I should specify the root domain (prohibitionhats.co.nz) or the 'www' subdomain (www.prohibitionhats.co.nz).

Are there any guidelines for this or will Moz automatically aggregate the data for both irrespective of the domain you choose?

Thanks

Laurie

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Laurie,

I agree with Dana. I think that whatever you choose for your Google Webmaster tools & the rel="canonical" this is yours <link <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">rel="canonical" href="http://www.prohibitionhats.co.nz" /</link <span>

Should show you the correct answer of if  you should use subdomain if it exists or not

The correct answer can always be found by going to show source and using either command or control really using your PC or Mac along with the F button and then typing in rel="canonical"

You will find as I have what the correct link is for your website and wanted 301 redirects to or should 301 redirect to all the time. In your case it is this link below showing that you should use the subdomain www.

rel="canonical" href="http://www.prohibitionhats.co.nz" /

www.prohibitionhats.co.nz

rel="canonical" href="" />

This is very important because this is where Google is going to send your links and your traffic if you pick the Google Webmaster tools and if it's 301 redirected it's where your links are going to go I hope I've been of help.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[turnbullholdingsltd]

Hey there. Thanks for the answer. That sounds really logical to me.

[danatanseo]

This is a great question and one I wish that Moz would give new users more guidance on in the beginning. You should set up your campaign based on whichever version of your site you set as the "preferred" in Google Webmaster Tools. I set up my campaigns without knowing this and once I figured it out and wanted to transition over, I had already gathered nearly 8 months of data. All of this would have been "lost" (I say that because of course I would have anything I had exported), if I had try to change my campaign from the "non WWW" to the "WWW" version mid stream.

Basically if you decide to change from one to the other,  you have to set up a completely new campaign, and there won't be any continuity (outside of anything you manually do using Excel, etc).

P.S. I would welcome feedback on my comments from the Moz community. I am hoping what I said was 100% accurate.