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
-
Unsolved URL Crawl Reports providing drastic differences: Is there something wrong?
A bit at a loss here. I ran a URL crawl report at the end of January on a website( https://www.welchforbes.com/ ). There were no major critical issues at the time. No updates were made on the website (that I'm aware of), but after running another crawl on March 14, the report was short about 90 pages on the site and suddenly had a ton of 403 errors. I ran a crawl again on March 15 to check if there was perhaps a discrepancy, and the report crawled even fewer pages and had completely different results again. Is there a reason the results are differing from report to report? Is there something about the reports that I'm not understanding or is there a serious issue within the website that needs to be addressed? Jan. 28 results:
Reporting & Analytics | | OliviaKantyka
Screen Shot 2022-03-16 at 3.00.52 PM.png March 14 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 10.31.22 AM.png March 15 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 4.06.42 PM.png0 -
Migrated website but Google Analytics still displays old URL's and none new?!
I migrated a website from a .aspx to a .php and hence had to 301 all the old urls to the new php ones. It's been months after and I'm not seeing any of the php pages showing results but I'm still getting results from the old .aspx pages. Has any one had any experience with this issue or knows what to do? Many thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | CoGri0 -
Virtual Pageviews vs. Destination URL for Goal tracking
I am working on setting up goal tracking. Currently when we receive a new signup, the person gets sent to their dashboard homepage and this is not a valuable a goal tracking destination. My suggestion was to build a "Welcome" interstitial page to send a user to when they create an account. Our tech team suggested using a Virtual pageview instead as it is their thinking that a "Welcome" page adds little value. Is there any downside to using Virtual Pageviews with regards to goal tracking?
Reporting & Analytics | | Vacatia_SEO
Are interstitial page more reliable?
Can you still use funnel visualization with Virtual Pageviews?0 -
How to find goo.gl/ URLs in Google Analytics
Hello! How does one go about finding the impact of goo.gl/ shortened URLs in Google Analytics? (I know I should be using Campaigns, but this was for an old project.) Thanks in advance! Erik
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO0 -
How to setup Google Analytic goals that go to different urls?
I would like to setup my form's conversion rate as a goal in my Google Analytics account. The goal is complete when someone enters their information and hits submit. Logically, the "Thank you page" would be the destination url for the goal. My problem is that the thank you page is outside of the primary domain, for example, my site is: SiteExampl.com but the Thank you URL is thankyouurl.com Is it possible to setup a goal like this? If so how. Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | christinarule0 -
Regex Filter To Exlude lower case urls
Buon Pormeriggio from Wetherby 22 degrees the summer continues! I need to set up a regex filter to knock out lowecase versions of http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/Sales/ Thing is Analytics is returning this lowercase version which i want to regex filter out.So if Regex filter /Sales/$ returns what i eant how do i knock out urls beginning with lowe case s. Grazie,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
David0 -
Get a list of robots.txt blocked URL and tell Google to crawl and index it.
Some of my key pages got blocked by robots.txt file and I have made required changes in robots.txt file but how can I get the blocked URL's list. My webmaster page Health>blocked URL's shows only number not the blocked URL's.My first question is from where can I fetch these blocked URL's and how can I get them back in searches, One other interesting point I see is that blocked pages are still showing up in searches.Title is appearing fine but Description shows blocked by robots.txt file. I need urgent recommendation as I do not want to see drop in my traffic any more.
Reporting & Analytics | | csfarnsworth0 -
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