Marketing is a crucial aspect of any product, whether it’s a website or the latest George Foreman grill. If done right, it can lead to huge conversion rates. But how can you track such campaigns on the web?
When people receive brochures, read articles in magazines or view other printed marketing material they may typically see a URL they are supposed to type out. This URL should typically be as short and as meaningful as possible; nobody wants to type out www.willans.net/amazing-website-strategy-guidelines. They are more likely to go to the website if the URL was shown as www.willans.net/web-strategy.
So what if you already have a page URL of ‘amazing-website-strategy-guidelines’? Renaming the file/path isn’t an option because it will mess about with SEO rankings, and anyone who has this page bookmarked would no longer be able to find it if it were to be changed. The solution is page redirects (or technically speaking, 301 permanent redirects).
You could either change amazing-website-strategy-guidelines to web-strategy and have web-strategy redirect to amazing-website-strategy-guidelines or vice-versa. But, if you use any analytical tool (such as Google Analytics) to track what pages the user has been on, it won’t track 301 redirects (because these tools rely on the page actually being loaded). To get around this, you can simply append a query string to the end of the URL. For example, www.willans.net/web-strategy would redirect to www.willans.net/amazing-website-strategy-guidelines/?campaign=my_facebook_campaign, which would show up in Google Analytics.
So how easy is setting up a 301 redirect? For a webmaster with access to Apache (or the Windows Server equivalent) it is relatively straightforward. But what if you want an even more hassle-free way (even if you are a webmaster)?
If you use WordPress then you’re in luck. John Godley created a plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily manage your 301 redirects (it also handles 404 error pages too). With no server knowledge required, you can easily redirect one page to another, and append query strings to URLs. It gets even better than that too – it also has it’s own built in stat counters so you can view the results even quicker.
This is the most efficient way I found of setting up campaign tracking. There may be better solutions, but this worked for me.