Custom URL tracking for paid online ads
-
Hello!
Our marketing team is testing paid online ad networks (banner ads, mobile ads and video ads) this year in addition to some traditional television advertising.
We would like to track how effective these various ads are, and I'm wondering the best method to do so. In all cases, we're not setting up new pages for these ads to go to. They will simply go to an existing page on our site. For tracking purposes, here's what I'm wondering... If we set up custom URLs on our site (e.g. www.example.com/sports) then have the visitor immediately redirected to the intended page on our site (typically our home page), will Google Analytics show that custom URL in any report to see how much traffic flowed through it? Or will it not register because a page doesn't really exist for that URL?
The biggest issue is with the banner ad network, which targets around ten categories of sites (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). I know I'll be able to find the network listed as a referrer to see the total traffic the network sent us, but we would like to know specifically which category drove the visits. As such, would a custom URL for each category work, or will Google Analytics not pick it up because it's not hitting an actual page?
For television ads, we are showing our URL as www.example.com/tv, which would then redirect to the intended landing page. In this case, it's a little more challenging because I won't have the referrer traffic to go by. But same problem... will GA recognize that URL and show it in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages?
I hope this makes sense. If not please let me know and I'll try to explain.
Thanks in advance,
Erik -
Thanks, John. Great information!
Erik
-
Dana is spot on with the Google URL builder. If you're tracking in Google Analytics, this is the way to go. My favorite report for this is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report. Select "Source/Medium" as your primary dimension, and you'll be able to how conversions are going by whatever utm_source and utm_medium parameters you put into your URLs. You can add a secondary dimension of Campaign path to see how things are going by utm_campaign. You can then search by any of those to see when campaigns are driving conversions. I do that all the time.
So for your banner campaign targeting different categories of sites, if they're all with one provider, I'd set a consistent utm_source and utm_medium, and vary the utm_campaign by the different campaigns you mentioned there as examples (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). If you're doing banners through Adwords, you can turn on "auto-tagging" which will automatically tag your ad URLs for you. See here for more info on that.
The easiest thing to do for TV campaigns is just to have www.example.com/tv redirect to your landing page with the utm parameters on it. For example, have www.example.com/tv redirect to www.example.com/tvlandingpage?utm_source=tv&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=hulu-ad or something along those lines. Since people coming from the TV are not being referred to you by another site, you shouldn't lose any referral data with the redirect.
-
Thanks Dana, that's great!
This should work well for ad campaigns (or Facebook) where the URL isn't visible. Any suggestion for the television example given? Is there a best practice for tracking a URL like that, where it requires the television viewer to physically type it in to their browser?
Thanks again,
Erik -
Hi Erik,
I believe you can use the Google Analytics URL Builder to accomplish what you want/need to do. Here's a link to Raven's version: http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/ or here's one straight from the source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
Here is a fabulous Whiteboard Friday presented by Rachel Gerson from SEER Interactive that explains why you want to tag your campaigns and how to do it: http://moz.com/blog/why-google-analytics-tagging-matters-whiteboard-friday
Hope that helps!
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
-
Backlinks Tracking Websites/Tools/Software
I have multiple websites that I need to keep track of their backlinks. How do you guys keep track of your backlinks? What are some cool tools that you use ?
Reporting & Analytics | | AngelosS0 -
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 -
Tracking an onpage 'event'
Hi all Wondering if anyone could help out with this one please. My client is a government backed free internet safety website and in the next few days they will be launching an update on all of their pages which will let people know if their browser is out of date. For example, when you go to their site you will get a message advising you to upgrade your browser for security reasons. They have employed the following code to check the browser The client are keen to know how many times in a period this message is shown to users. Any idea how one would go about tracking this please. Would it involve some custom GA work, would I be able to track the hits on https://wxxxx.org/javascript/update.js in GA? I'm a little stumped. Obviously I can tell how many people loaded the page but not sure how to work out what % of them see the javascript Many thanks for your help Carl
Reporting & Analytics | | GrumpyCarl0 -
What's the final word on Image Search tracking in Google Analytics?
Sorry if this has been answered but I can't seem to get a straight answer to my questions by searching around. How is traffic referred by Google Images counted in Google Analytics? I know it used to be referral traffic from google.com/imgres. A lot of things I have read say that it should all be under google/organic now, but my site still gets referral traffic from google.com/imgres, so that can't be. However I also get traffic as google/organic that I am pretty sure is from image search, because we don't rank for the keyword normally, but we do for image search. What's the deal? How is traffic from an embedded image in a regular result page counted? How can I segment my image search traffic better? It would be great to see image search traffic as it's own medium. I found a script here -- http://jrom.net/google-images-in-google-analytics -- that looks promising, has anyone used it or can recommend another way? I haven't used the GA API very much so I want to make sure the script is kosher and won't screw up my numbers.
Reporting & Analytics | | tact0 -
Newbie Need Step by Step to Track .ca Domaine Redirect from GoDaddy to .com
I, I ask a few time about how to track using Google Analytics, my domain, www.pilatesboisfranc.ca bought at GoDaddy and redirect from the GoDaddy control panel to my domain, http://www.pilatesboisfranc.com/ I don't know anything about coding or webdesign, I did this web site from a theme on wordpress for my wife opening this Pilates Studio in our neighbourhood soon. http://www.pilatesboisfranc.ca/ is advertise on our car.(it will be nice to see if that advertising is worth it!) http://www.pilatesboisfranc.ca/ is redirect from GoGDaddy control panel to the site: http://www.pilatesboisfranc.com/ I had a few answers on this forum, but I'm not sure how to do this. My knowledges are very limited in html and all technical side. Thank to WordPress, Lynda.com and Theme Forest. Those are the tools I took to built this basic web site. Can any body help me track this .ca? I will need a step by step guide to achieve my goal. Google Analytics is instal on the site. Any help will be really appreciated. Thank you, BigBlaze
Reporting & Analytics | | BigBlaze2050 -
Can anyone shed some light on mobile inbound call tracking?
Is there any way to track the call button from the local listings within the mobile SERPs??
Reporting & Analytics | | cybercom0 -
Why do I have few different index URL addresses?
Yes I know, sorry guys but I also have a problem with duplicate pages. It shows that almost every page of my site has a duplicate content issue and looking at my folders in the server, I don't see all these pages... This is a static Website with no shopping cart or anything fancy. The first on the list is my [index] page and this is giving me a hint about some sort of bad settings on my end with the SEOMOZ crawler??? Please advice and thank you! index-variations.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | cssyes0 -
Search within search? Weird google URLs
Good morning afternoon, how are you guys doing today? I'm experiencing a few Panda issues I'm trying to fix, and I was hoping I could get some help here about one of my problems. I used Google analytics to extract pages people land on after a Google search. I'm trying to identify thin pages that potentially harm my website as a whole. It turns out I have a bunch of pages in the likes of the following: /search?cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google .co.uk, and so on for a bunch of countries (.fi, .com, .sg, .pk, and so on, maybe 50 of them) My question is: what are those pages? their stats are awful, usually 1 visitor, 100% bounce rate, and 0 links. Do you think they can explain my dramatic drop in traffic following Panda? If so, what should I do with them? NOINDEX? Deletion? What would you suggest? I also have a lot of links in the likes of the following: /google-search?cx=partner-pub-6553421918056260:armz8yts3ql&cof=FORID:10&ie=ISO-8859-1&sa=Search&siteurl=www.mysite.com/content/article They lead to custom search pages. What should I do with them? Almost two weeks ago, Dr. Pete posted an article untitled Fat Panda and Thin Content in which he deals with "search within search" and how they might be targeted by Panda. Do you think this is the issue I'm facing? Any suggestion/help would be much appreciated! Thanks a lot and have a great day 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Ericc220