Vanity URL vs domain URL

[Taysir]

Hi guys,

Our CEO is having an interview with a known broadcaster on radio. During the interview he will mention a specific URL www.example.com/marketingcampaign that we want track on Google Analytics, therefore behaving like a vanity URL redirecting to the actual URL www.example.com/resources/primary-keyword-2018.

Would this work the same way a vanity URL in terms of tracking or not such as following guideline here ? I am asking because vanity URLs are supposed to be completely different domain name that gets purchased and in our case it is the same domain name just with a different URI.

thanks guys!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Taysir

You can catch all the data you need by analysing this URL in analytics: www.example.com/marketingcampaign

Why do you need to 301 somewhere else? It doesn't make any sense.

UTM parameters could only be used if you append an existing URL (eg the homepage) with tracking. for example, if you had an email campaign or Facebook. As yours is aural (listened to on the radio) you wouldn't be able to convey it so it would be useless. Worth noting though.

Regards

Nigel

[Taysir]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for your response.

So you're recommending not to 301 redirect www.example.com/marketingcampaign to  www.example.com/resources/primary-keyword-2018 but the whole purpose is to capture the listeners who remember this one time URL(this will only be mentioned for this radio show) within Google Analytics. If I don't redirect this URL then I will never know how many radio listeners came to our website, right?

Or am i missing something here?

Finally could you clarify this bit _"You could just use a preferred landing page and use UTM parameters to track in Analytics if you knew which source it was coming from." _What is the setup and how would this work?

Thanks for your time!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Taysir

I can understand why you would want to do this and this is a perfectly acceptable way of doing it. However, I'm not sure why you would want to redirect it to another page. Why not just put all the information required on that page www.example.com/marketingcampaign?

There may (depending on who you listen to - I'm with Rand) up to 15% loss of link juice passing through a 301 redirect.

Also by publicising the 'vanity URL' it may well be indexed by Google but then de-indexed in favour of www.example.com/resources/primary-keyword-2018. because of the 301 redirect. When people searched for that page it wouldn't exist!

Intentionally setting up a URL that 301s is just bad practice and you risk Google not respecting it and listing both URLs anyway - so any ranking could go out of the window.

So in conclusion - fine having the 'vanity URL' (as you call it - it's a bit of an old-fashioned expression - any URL these days could be considered a 'vanity URL' - it was in the days when URLs had long strings of numbers and non-relevenat characters) but don't bother 301 redirecting. Use that single URL to provide all the information you need. You will be able to see it in Google analytics along with all of the source data.

(If you do decide to redirect - I wouldn't - do it in the htaccess file as it will all be seamless. Don't do it by java on the 'vanity URL' page. )

You could just use a preferred landing page and use UTM parameters to track in Analytics if you knew which source it was coming from.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Regards Nigel