Distinguishing Duplicated Links
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Distinguishing Duplicated Links |
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A page that links to another often does so from several different hyperlinks. The most common example is a home page with a navigation bar at the top and another with text only links at the bottom. Since both hyperlinks point to the same URL, the request is identical regardless of whether the user clicks the top link or the bottom.
Marketers sometimes need to know which link is really being used more, since this can heavily influence site design decisions.
ClickTracks is able to distinguish these links if a parameter is added to them within the HTML. Each time the link is used on a given page, a parameter with a different value should be added so the links can be distinguished when ClickTracks reads the logfile.
Since this requires a modification to the site you should plan carefully and thoroughly understand what needs to be done.
| • | Decide on a single parameter that will be used to distinguish and that has an easy to recognize name like 'from' or similar. |
| • | Decide on a consistent set of values. For example 'from=topnav' and 'from=bottomnav' or 'linkid=1' and 'linkid=2'. The value needs to be unique within a page for a given link, but does not have to be unique for every single link and page. For example the two links 'news.php?from=topnav' and 'product.php?from=topnav' have the same distinguishing parameter, but this is OK because they're referencing different pages. |
| • | The parameter must appear as the last one on each link. news.php?catalogid=5&from=topnav for example. |
| • | Once the site is modified to include the parameter on each page, you'll need to set the date range in ClickTracks to include only the dates after this. |
| • | Be aware of possible side effects in search engine optimization. |
Adding this parameter to each link could affect the ability of search engine spiders to crawl and index your site. This depends on the particular search engine, and the technology it currently employs. Consult a specialist search engine consultant and have them evaluate this for you.
Once the parameter is setup on your site you simply need to configure ClickTracks to use it. Options->advanced and choose the parameter name from the drop down menu.