The best way to track internal links in Google Analytics

[Bee159]

Hi there, we are a retail business and we have invested in quality editorial content which sits in our Blog at ourwebsite.co.uk/blog/

The Blog links to the main site (an online store) and I want to track the 'value' of the blog by how many clicks the blog content generates back to the main store.

At the moment we're using this code on the end of every link in the Blog:

?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Widget&utm_campaign=FromBlog

Does this affect SEO and is there a better way of doing it? Thanks.

[Madstrategist]

I believe having a blog directly affects search traffic to your site. However, the value of your blog is indirectly linked to sales. You don't need to use a UTM at the end of your article URL's instead I would look over the traffic your entries are receiving and take GOOGLE Analytics for power users, free course, to see if they shed light on how you may link your blog to revenue performance.

[DirkC]

It has no SEO impact (*) but you shouldn't use analytics campaign tracking for measuring internal links as it will mess up your data.

Several other options exists - like event tracking or custom dimensions. There is an interesting article from Cutroni on the subject you might want to check out.

Dirk

(*) provided that your destination url is using a canonical url - if not you could have duplicated content issues as both the domain.com/article.htm?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Widget&utm_campaign=FromBlog & domain.com/article.htm will exist

[Alick300]

Hi Ben,

No It doesn't affect SEO. Webmasters use url builder only to know correct source, medium and campaign. IMO url builder is fine to use to track blog traffic.

Thanks