URL offline advertising

[Paul78]

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

[ShaMenz]

Good point Keri,

Perhaps most important of all would be a nice big visible link to the product from the home page

Sha

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[ShaMenz]

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

[Paul78]

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?

[eunaneunan]

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.

[Paul78]

Sorry, another question

the URL example/tv will I be able to see how many users have visited this page via Analytics?

Kind Regards

[ShaMenz]

No probs...the Rewrite Rule goes in the .htaccess file.

Hope your campaign is successful

Sha

[Paul78]

Just one more question if you don't mind:

The URL rewrite, where is this made? Server? On page? .htaccess file?

Kind Regards

[Paul78]

Thanks very much for the tip

Kind Regards

[ShaMenz]

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

[Paul78]

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

[ShaMenz]

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