How to turn on persistent urls in WordPress?
-
I'm using an appointment form on my website and I have the option to add a referral url to form submissions so that i know which pages the form submission came from.
I need to be able to distinguish between organically generated form submissions and those that come in via AdWords. If referral url shows the AdWords tracking code i know the form submission came in from AdWords.
My problem is that when a visitor comes in after clicking an ad and then visits another page on my website that AdWords tracking code disappears from the url. I was told that there was a way to turn on persistent urls in WordPress but I can't figure out how to do it.
I'm assuming that if i turn persistent urls on the AdWords tracking code will remain on every subsequent url that they visit on my website. Is this true?
Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.
-
Thanks for your help everyone. I'm working on the GCLID attribution now.
-
Max is definitely right that you need code. The most common attribution method is last non direct. The easiest way to determine PPC v SERPs is to try to grab the GCLID. If you end up growing your business and/or merging this information back to AdWords from the offline conversion tracking option they offer you will need the GCLID.
-
This is just going to disable yoast canonical url, I don't see how could it help passing query string parameters through the user visit path.
-
You can use either one or another, cookie is persistent through different visits (and last as long as you decide it to last), while the session variable last only for the current user session. Depends on the attribution window you want to use.
-
Thanks for your help guys. I've tried using your method smarttill but unfortunately it didn't work.
I will try it your way Max but how do i log where the visitor is coming from with a cookie or a session variable?
-
Add SEO Yoast as a plugin tin Wordpress. add this to your functions.php add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', '__return_false' );
-
You need coding, when the visitor land on the entry page of your site take the utm_source or utm_campaign from the url and log where he is coming from, in a cookie, session variable, etc... Then pass it through on form submission. You can use header, footer or any wordpress piece of code used in every page.
You can't keep the query string through the visitor path unless you code too, and it's more complex, and I don't believe you can find a wordpress plugin doing that. For sure is not something you can do with a standard wordpress installation.
-
Thanks for your help Max but i don't need to know how many leads came in through the different referral sources. I already know that. What i do need to do is identify each form submission as coming from organic traffic or ppc.
Like i've mentioned earlier, the leads coming in through the form need to be logged into a client management software so i need to take the contact information of the form submitter and enter it in the system as coming from organic or ppc. This is done to track ROI.
-
Maybe I am missing something, but form submission is either PPC or organic because the visitor is coming from PPC or Organic. So if you define a goal in analytics for the form submission, triggered either by url match or javascript, you can later check in analytics how many lead were generated through PPC or organic checking the goals per channel/referral/campaign.
Keep in mind you can use utm_source, utm_campaing, etc... In the links originating the leads, if you control them.
-
I know analytics. I can see referral traffic and goal paths and all that. What I need is to be able to attribute individual form submissions to either organic or ppc traffic.
Each form submission is a lead. Each lead needs to be logged in a client management software so in order to properly attribute a lead to either ppc or organic traffic i need to use persistent urls so that the referral url field in my form reflects the traffic source vie google tracking code in the url.
I hope someone here can help shed some light on this. Thanks.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving wordpress themes, any best practices on setting up Google Analytics for the change?
We currently have a mess of filters and views in our Google Analytics instance. We have a chance to make a clean start. Wondering if creating a whole new property is a good idea? Or just some additional views? Any other pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | jill.myers0 -
Adding a Query String to a Static URL is that good or bad?
I just went through this huge process to shorten my URL structure and remove all dynamic strings. Now my analytics team wants to add query strings to track clicks from the homepage. Is this going to destroy my clean url structure by appending a query string to the end of the URL structure.
Reporting & Analytics | | rpaiva0 -
URL Keyword & Meta Title Problem
I was just reviewing my Moz report and came across something I could use advice on. The Keyword is "irish cardigans" I just moved to down a place to #5. I was going to add content to the page and back link a little to get back up on rankings but I noticed it is not all matching up. My Keyword is "irish cardigans" My Url is structured: products/traditional-irish-clothing-arans My metatitle is: Irish Sweaters - Traditional Irish Clothing - Arans & Cardigans The content title on the page heading is: Irish Sweaters and Cardigans. How will I change this to get my ranking better for "Irish Cardigans" The Page is also ranking for "Traditional Irish Clothing and Irish Sweaters" How do I know if I structure it to "Irish Cardigans" I will not loose traffic etc from the other keywords. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | robbieire0 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0 -
OSE shows URLs redirecting to our custom created error page, is this a problem?.
When I check the link metrics for my product pages in OSE, it shows a message saying that the page redirects to our custom error page. This page was recently created to display when there is an error with the website. Do I need to be concerned that OSE is seeing all product pages as redirecting to this error page? Will it affect page authority etc,? I have attached a screen shot of the message that OSE displays for reference. YWbpM.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | pugh0 -
Duplicate Url with Google shopping feed
In webmaster tool I have many duplicate url tagged as google_shopping Obviously i'm tagging the url with the goog url builder Url: elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/cura-corpo/tagliacapelli/remington-tagliacapelli-funzionamento-rete-ricaricabile-lame-in-acciaio-inox-hc5150-garanzia/ Duplicate url: elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/cura-corpo/tagliacapelli/remington-tagliacapelli-funzionamento-rete-ricaricabile-lame-in-acciaio-inox-hc5150-garanzia/?utm_source=google_shopping&utm_medium=web&utm_content=Elettrodomestici+e+Clima+%3E+Cura+del+corpo+%3E+Tagliacapelli&utm_campaign=google_shopping How can I solve it? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | yeppon0 -
URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone
Hey people, I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
Reporting & Analytics | | dumperama
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user) Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP. But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month. Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords. You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped. So I'd like to know if you observed similar results. Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago? Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though. All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise... I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!0 -
Tagging URLs Linkbuilding and anchor links
Hi, I am going to publish a press release on a number of different websites. First and foremost, I want to build anchor links back to website for specific keywords. Secondly I want to measure clickthrus from each site using parameter tracking in GA. I want to know if I put in a url with ?utm_source=xxx, will this have any impact upon my linkbuilding efforts? i.e. will search engines attribute the keyword to the long url with tracking or the url without tracking. I understand that everything from the ? mark is ignored. However, i just want to double check before I publish release. Thanks for your help. Mik
Reporting & Analytics | | increation0