In our printed materials and in conversation, we'll encourage conference attendees to visit, a URL that we’ve setup to automatically redirect to our main law firm landing page. At the Legal Marketing Association conference, we’ll direct people to this page with a simple URL that’s both trackable and easy to remember. We've worked to create a single landing page that explains our offerings to law firms and how we can help them. Naturally, we would want to track our efforts at the conference and see how many folks from the conference might check us out afterwards. One example would be if we decided to host a booth at a national law firm marketing conference. Analyzing this data helps us to gauge the effectiveness of our marketing efforts and plan ahead for the future. We market specifically to law firms in a number of different ways, so it’s incredibly valuable to break down the elements of our strategy and see which techniques are most effective in pushing visitors to our law firm landing page. In addition to all of the verticals we work in, one of our most popular specialties is law firm website design.
The Situation & Need for Tracking a Landing Page Redirect
This leads to the question at hand: how do you determine which redirects are the most effective?īelow we’ll explain why this type of analysis can be helpful in the first place and how to use query strings (also known as URL parameters) to track redirects in your Google Analytics dashboard. This limits your ability to measure the effectiveness of each of the campaigns. You may have been relying on those redirects to track different campaigns or materials you’ve sent out, but Google Analytics’ broad approach won’t allow you to see how the visitors actually got to the final page. So for example, if /offerings and /capabilities both redirect to, you can see how much traffic ended up at the final /services URL, but not the specific redirect(s) that sent your visitors to that destination. The data is not separated based on which URL forwarded visitors to the page, eliminating helpful metrics that might point out which redirect or campaign was most successful in increasing site traffic. Google Analytics only provides the raw traffic numbers to the specific, final URL that each visitor ends up on. Without a plan, you might find yourself lost when trying to track how many people clicked or typed a URL ending in /promotion that in turn redirected to a core piece of site content at a different URL.
It comes up often with our clients - how do I track the performance of a URL that I’ve set up to redirect to a different page? Whether you’re running an offline marketing campaign with a specific URL, measuring the performance of a landing page, managing digital ads targeted at different audiences, or analyzing conversion rates, tracking your redirects can offer key information that will help you to better pursue your business goals. We’ll also offer some tips on how to track specific campaigns that use redirects to landing pages. In this post, we’ll help you to understand what Google Analytics is tracking in terms of site visits.
If you’re interested in learning more about Google Analytics, check out our other blog posts on Using Google Analytics for Free A/B Split Testing and How to Schedule Weekly Google Analytics Email Reports.
Updated – This post was updated from the previous version to include some new tips and fresh examples.