Can I do this with a web address?

[faststaff]

Hi

Probably a really simple question here, but I am redoing my website at

www.rafsolutions.co.uk

and I'm wanting to make better use of analytics.

Can I change the site address depending on where I'm publicising it?

For example, can I change my signature link to;

www.rafsolutions.co.uk/?=sig

or my twitter link to;

www.rafsolutions.co.uk/?twits

etc, etc?

Is there a correct format for this, and will it show up seperately in the the various stats programs?

Cheers
Richard

PS - No taking the mick out of my website. As I keep telling everyone, it's a work in progress!

[MGDigital]

There should be no need for this- Google Analytics already gives detailed breakdowns of which visitors are coming from where. Just click on "traffic sources" in your Analytics interface.

[faststaff]

Can I do it though? Surely Analytics can't tell me what traffic is coming from my email signature?

Rich

[MGDigital]

It can't tell specifically that your signature was clicked, but it can see which sites your users are coming from. If I clicked on your signature here on UKBF, then it would show in your Analytics that you'd had one visitor referred by UKBF...

[MGDigital]

I see what you mean about the email signatures- if someone was reading one of your emails in Outlook and clicked the link in your signature, then it wouldn't show up in Analytics that someone had clicked on your email signature.

You could in theory change the link in your sig to something like www.yoursite.com?ref=emailsig, but in my opinion this would be a bit messy and not really worth it. Also if they bookmarked the site from that link then that would give false positives in future.

If you were setting up an email marketing campaign then most good campaign software would use methods like this to track click-throughs. As for day-to-day emailing, I don't really think it's worth setting up something like this.

Hope that helps!

[FireFleur]

HTTP_REFERER ( good ole' dyslexic Tim) .

Is a header sent by the browser to the server, and is accessible to javascript via document.referrer .

So for example, if you want to see the page the browser thinks you came from just add this code snippet into the url address bar by itself on this page, or any page.

JavaScript:alert(document.referrer);

And it should display a page address just before here.

It can be turned off, but most don't bother, and it is this type of information analytics is grabbing.

[DavidT]

If you're using Google Analytics you can make use of the campaigns to track what links are clicked.

URL Builder - https://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578


David Toohey
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