If you are doing any type of email promotion for your website I’m sure you have come across putting your website URL in the email – in an email to friends, to your mailing list in multiple emails.
Now, you can simply use a naked link (For example, http://www.gurucs.com is a naked link) when posting your website URL in the emails that you send out, but when you look at your web traffic analytic program (such as Webalizer, Awstats, or Google Analytics) you may notice a traffic spike from a recent series of email pieces that you sent out and not know which email generated most click-thru to your site.
There is a quick and dirty way to hack your URL to embed link tracking information.
It’s really quite simple. All you have to is insert a “?token=value” at the end of your URL.
For example, if I were to be promoting the $5 web hosting service by sending out multiple emails and I want to track which email generates the most response (click-thru rate), I would simple tag my URL with an arbitrary token and value in my first email:
http://www.gurucs.com/services/web-hosting/5-dollar-web-hosting/?email=1st
In my second email, I could use this link to track my open rate:
http://www.gurucs.com/services/web-hosting/5-dollar-web-hosting/?email=2nd
and so on…
This trick and also be used in other situations where you know the referrer links will most likely be coming from the same source (in this case they will come from email websites such as Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) and you need a way to differentiate the traffic source.
You may also tag on additional query string variables by separating the token/value pair with & sign such as:
http://www.gurucs.com/services/web-hosting/5-dollar-web-hosting/?source=email&provider=gmail
http://www.gurucs.com/services/web-hosting/5-dollar-web-hosting/?source=email&provider=yahoo
In the above example I could hypothetically be emailing the same email to 2 lists. One with recipients who are using Gmail, one with recipients using Yahoo and these URLs will let me track the click-thru rate for each list.
Note for Awstats:
The URLWithQuery configuration must be turned on for query string for this to work:
URLWithQuery
Keep or remove the query string to the URL in the statistics for individual
pages. This is primarily used to differentiate between the URLs of dynamic
pages. If set to 1, mypage.html?id=x and mypage.html?id=y are counted as two
different pages.
Warning, when set to 1, memory required to run AWStats is dramatically
increased if you have a lot of changing URLs (for example URLs with a random
id inside). Such web sites should not set this option to 1 or use seriously
the next parameter URLWithQueryWithoutFollowingParameters.
Possible values:
0 – URLs are cleaned from the query string (ie: “/mypage.html”)
1 – Full URL with query string is used (ie: “/mypage.html?p=x&q=y”)
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