Custom GA tracking and link value

[NeilInFrance]

Hi

I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink)

In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment

But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts).

I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links.

Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them?

What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking

Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ?

Thanks for you help

• Neil

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Neil,

I'm looking at older questions that are still marked unanswered. Did you come up with a solution for this, or are you still looking for some advice?

[NeilInFrance]

Damion,

Thanks for the reply.

I do use advanced segments and it's also easy getting info from the All Traffic Sources report

But I do have some cases where one site can contain natural editorial links and paid banner ad links. Other cases where a page can have different types of links: on a banner or text link.

We're thinking about using analytics to distinguish these ; but I think that you're right, the main drag will be making sure that all links are actually updated correcly.

• Neil

[damionbrown]

Do you actually need to tag all the URLs? Are you able to create an advanced segment based on "if referrer = X OR if referrer = Y" ?

Tricky explaining this I guess, my apologies -- what I'm getting at is whether you can set up a relatively complex Advanced Segment in Analytics to bucket all these referral visits together. That way you can test how that segment performs in context to the rest of the site and other groups of users.

With URL tagging you're effectively giving the visitor an allocation before they hit Analytics. With the Advanced Segment route, you're allocating the visitor afterwards.

If this can work for you, I'd recommend it as as the more suitable route, mainly because it's easier to administer (asking 900 webmasters to change URLs, and to follow them up to make sure they've done it, would be a nightmare. Plus, there's always the chance that a non-tagged URL might slip through the net, and your data integrity becomes compromised.)

I'm personally not convinced that changing URL parameters has any significant effect on link juice or ranking, but I don't think that's the most important issue here -- in my opinion, you'd be much better off using advanced segments to track these visitors, and doing that doesn't require any modification of inbound URLs.

[stevenmusumeche]

You could tag them and use rel canonical on your site to the untagged version of the URL.