Skip to main content
Webmasters

Return to Question

Added code formatting so it would be displayed, and made other corrections and clarifications.
Source Link
dan ♦
dan ♦
  • 15.2k
  • 11
  • 45
  • 52

Best practice for monitoring How can I track referrals from offline materials using Google Analytics?

My client is about to issue a bundle of offline materials (leaflets, posters, etc...) for distribution to various places for PR and marketing purposes. They've asked us to create a number of special URLs that all go to the homepage of their site, through which they can identify the place where the poster was hung / leaflet handed out as the referrer. For example, different leaflets and posters might have different URLs as below:

www.example.com/partner1
www.example.com/partner2

We use Joomla as our CMS, and it's fairly trivial to use its 'Redirect Manager' to alias these special URLs to the home page so that they don't flag as 404sresult in 404 errors.

However, I'd also like to intelligently track these URLs. Of course, I could add the standard utm<code>utm</code> Google Analytics tracking paramsparameters onto the end of the friendly URLs, but this wouldwouldn't be very friendly (www.example.com/partner1?utm_source=posterCampaign&utm_medium=....www.example.com/partner1?utm_source=posterCampaign&utm_medium=....). But I would like them to flag in GAGoogle Analytics as a special type of referral.

What would be best practice in a scenario like this, other than just filtering in the GAGoogle Analytics dashboard on pathNamepathName or some such?

Best practice for monitoring referrals from offline materials?

My client is about to issue a bundle of offline materials (leaflets, posters, etc) for distribution to various places for PR and marketing purposes. They've asked us to create a number of special URLs that all go to the homepage of their site, through which they can identify the place where the poster was hung / leaflet handed out as the referrer. For example, different leaflets and posters might have different URLs as below:

www.example.com/partner1
www.example.com/partner2

We use Joomla as our CMS, and it's fairly trivial to use its 'Redirect Manager' to alias these special URLs to the home page so that they don't flag as 404s.

However, I'd also like to intelligently track these URLs. Of course, I could add the standard utm Google Analytics tracking params onto the end of the friendly URLs, but this would be very friendly (www.example.com/partner1?utm_source=posterCampaign&utm_medium=....). But I would like them to flag in GA as a special type of referral.

What would be best practice in a scenario like this, other than just filtering in the GA dashboard on pathName or some such?

How can I track referrals from offline materials using Google Analytics?

My client is about to issue a bundle of offline materials (leaflets, posters, etc...) for distribution to various places for PR and marketing purposes. They've asked us to create a number of special URLs that all go to the homepage of their site, through which they can identify the place where the poster was hung / leaflet handed out as the referrer. For example, different leaflets and posters might have different URLs as below:

www.example.com/partner1
www.example.com/partner2

We use Joomla as our CMS, and it's fairly trivial to use its 'Redirect Manager' to alias these special URLs to the home page so that they don't result in 404 errors.

However, I'd also like to intelligently track these URLs. Of course, I could add the standard <code>utm</code> Google Analytics tracking parameters onto the end of the friendly URLs, but this wouldn't be very friendly (www.example.com/partner1?utm_source=posterCampaign&utm_medium=....). But I would like them to flag in Google Analytics as a special type of referral.

What would be best practice in a scenario like this, other than just filtering in the Google Analytics dashboard on pathName or some such?

Source Link
codinghands
codinghands
  • 155
  • 6

Best practice for monitoring referrals from offline materials?

My client is about to issue a bundle of offline materials (leaflets, posters, etc) for distribution to various places for PR and marketing purposes. They've asked us to create a number of special URLs that all go to the homepage of their site, through which they can identify the place where the poster was hung / leaflet handed out as the referrer. For example, different leaflets and posters might have different URLs as below:

www.example.com/partner1
www.example.com/partner2

We use Joomla as our CMS, and it's fairly trivial to use its 'Redirect Manager' to alias these special URLs to the home page so that they don't flag as 404s.

However, I'd also like to intelligently track these URLs. Of course, I could add the standard utm Google Analytics tracking params onto the end of the friendly URLs, but this would be very friendly (www.example.com/partner1?utm_source=posterCampaign&utm_medium=....). But I would like them to flag in GA as a special type of referral.

What would be best practice in a scenario like this, other than just filtering in the GA dashboard on pathName or some such?