Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the reasoning for not using this method all the time is that it only works when
you control the link sending the traffic to your web property, such as setting up paid
search campaigns. if a high-traffic blog review of one of your products starts sending
continuous good-quality traffic to your site, i suggest you set that up as a campaign.
instead of persuading a blogger to change the link to include a tracking string (which
i discourage), you can catch the traffic on the referrer UrL, which is likely to be a
unique blog post.
How do you identify campaigns for which the tracking string is removed? in this
not-so-unusual scenario, we have a campaign source where the referrer is not unique
and your website setup and structure is so that the tracking string is removed. You are
essentially left with nothing in the UrL, either before or after, to work with.
the reason is that some websites use a redirect, which might remove the track-
ing string by not passing it on. this is not necessarily something you just fix server
side, say, by deploying vanity UrLs as part of a marketing campaign, which are then
redirected to the permanent address on your site. this approach will not work if you
do not own those vanity domains.
the good news is that Yahoo! Web analytics has a way of working within this
setup, using the variable
_S_CMPQUERY
to pass on the tracking string outside the UrL.
Let's use our earlier example where we might use the following landing page
UrL to catch a campaign:
visualrevenue.com/example/dennis.html?campaign=1
and we envision that this is redirected to a permanent campaign UrL as follows:
visualrevenue.com/example
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You are in a situation where you might not be able to use the referrer UrL, you
cannot use the landing page UrL, and there are no UrL parameters to analyze. so
you would use the
_S_CMPQUERY
variable, having it equal the original campaign tracking
string. thus, you apply the following variable to the tracking script:
Version 4
var _S_CMPQUERY='campaign=1';
Version 5
YWATracker.setCmpQuery(“campaign=1“);
this instrumentation will forward the campaign tracking information to Yahoo!
Web analytics without having the tracking string displayed in the UrL.
Setting Up New Campaigns
Before i begin, let me repeat that you do not need to make any changes to the tracking
script to activate campaign management in general. this is entirely something that is
