SEO Friendly Campaign Tracking

[mylesmg]

For those of you out there who have a significant number of online advertising campaigns, it may have occurred to you that your tracking strings are not search engine friendly. This is a common problem for nearly all visitor tracking systems, especially those without any marketing features such as the marketing automation features found within the AIMpromote lead management system.

A typical destination URL for a banner advertisement or text link might look like this:

http://www.example.com/optimized-page.html?campaignId=1234

This is perfectly fine if you don't have any desire to optimize your website for the search engines, or don't care to use the advertisement to improve your search engine rankings. If, like most of us, you do want to leverage whatever clout your publisher (the website on which you are advertising) has with the search engines to improve your rankings, you will not want to have a tracking string on your URL. The reason for this is that the search engines will actually think that the page with the tracking string is a different page than the URL without the tracking string.

http://www.example.com/optimized-page.html?campaignId=1234

is considered a different page, than

http://www.example.com/optimized-page.html

You are therefore sending the link to a page other than the one you really want to have appear in the search engines. In addition, if the page with the tracking URL appears in the search engines, your analytics program will think that hits from the search engine are actually from your advertising campaign. This will adversely affect the accuracy of your statistics and reports.

In AIMpromote, with a new feature added to the marketing automation system, we can now assign a lead to a campaign when it arrives based on the website that drove the lead. In essence, we can just look at the domain from which the visitor arrived, and use that to determine the advertising campaign that should get the credit for the lead and/or the sale.

While this doesn't address click-thru statistics, it does give you a more accurate way to track return on investment and other campaign performance metrics effectively. This is in addition to using the advertiser to help your search engine rankings more effectively.

To set this up, you simply browse to Settings->Marketing Automation and click "Add a New Trigger".

Then follow these steps:

1. Give your trigger a name and description
2. In the Trigger Conditions tab create a new condition "Based on Referring Domain" and choose the advertiser from the list in the drop-down menu.
3. In the "Action Sequence" tab click on "Credit this Lead to a Campaign"

That's it. You are now tracking your campaign-generated leads with search engine friendly URLs.

[globalsky]

This is pretty neat. I believe AimPromote is extremely feature rich. Question - why not upgrade your interface? I think that's the only thing holding you guys back. The features are great but its challenging to fight my way through everything in the beginning. You should setup simple options and advanced options. Turn on / off.

[mylesmg]

Thank you for the input. That is a very good suggestion. We have considered that, and talked to other customers. We have not had a great deal of requests for this type of advanced/basic settings option, but it is on the table. The reason that this is a low priority update is because most AIMpromote users don't have as many options as the admin, because their accounts are partially restricted by configuration. This means that they have far fewer options available to them. In practice this is similar in nature to the Advanced/Basic settings setup that you described.