Most hosts come with softwares or google analytics which allows you to know how a person got to your site, for example: a link on yelp.com or a facebook.com page link.
But it is impossible for the software to know what method of marketing got a person to visit your site if he directly typed the url (those analytic softwares show them as "direct url").
I need a creative idea where I can refine this broad term "direct url".
One way would be to use flyers with QR codes (links to the website) but instead of the website itself I direct them to clickemart.ca/flyer1_referrer which in turn sends him to the website clickemart.ca but a different flyer distributed to a different location would have a QR code which can be scanned to direct a mobile user to clickemart.ca/flyer2_referrer
So my question is, is this possible, will I be able to figure out which flyer 1 or 2 was more effective based on visits to the redirect urls? If it is possible can you give me a brief idea on how to implement it?
I know a lot of you will say add a form field with "source of referrer" on the site but from my experience this is never filled or filled with incorrect values (typically the closest to the mouse pointer or the top most option or "other" - you get it, something useless).
Any help or guidance is really appreciated!
Solved it here is how:
Connect your site to Google Analytics (www.google.ca/analytics)
Create a campaign URL (support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en)
OPTIONAL: shorten the URL (www.bitly.com)
Create a QR code to the URL (www.qrstuff.com/)
Scan the QR code and watch it appear as a campaign referral under Google Analytics
Here is an explanation to the different steps:
Once you create an account on Google Analytics, you can connect the site by copying a PHP script or a JavaScript onto every page or in my case (magento) the user code can simply be connected through the configuration settings
The campaign URL adds information to the URL link of your website just like the current link on stackoverflow.com variables such as noredirect="..." contains info for your server to process, so using the campaign URL could be used as a tag to determine the source of the referral
Shortening the URL is recommended because the QR code becomes less dense and this in turn reduces the chance of error while scanning the code, the shortened URL links directly to the campaign URL link you provided so it is a seamless process
QRStuff is a good place to download the QR code image at a high resolution
So when you scan this is what happens:
CODE SCANNED >> PHONE COMMAND TO GO TO SHORTENED URL LINK >> REDIRECT TO CAMPAIGN URL >> GOOGLE ANALYTICS RECEIVES INFO ABOUT CAMPAIGN REFERRAL >> YOU CAN SEE IT BY LOGIN INTO GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Related
I have implemented AMP successfully for my webpages and google started indexing it, which I came to know via WebMaster tool. I am facing some issues which is present and disappears in short span of time.
Issue logged are:
User authored JavaScript found on page
The pages doesn't contain any script tags except schema.
This error is showing for few pages from 120 pages instead of following same
template. Below is the image link:
Have some more query:
I have observe different amp urls getting redirected to its original page when the same amp url is being used in Web Browser.
Is Google taking care of it or its on us to do the redirection?
I am planning to implement the sign in and share buttons on my web pages which will be using javascript. But if I do so, I do get validation error. So what is the right approach.
Can anyone please help me on this?
Please ensure that all script tags are of type application/ld+json. There should be no executable code in these script tags.
Redirection is something that you must be doing on your end. Google doesn't do any sort of redirection from AMP to non-amp pages if the URL is hit directly. In fact that URL schema that Google uses in their carousel is entirely their own, and just includes the path to your page inside it. E.g. https://cdn.ampproject.org/v/www.yoursitehere.com/path/to/article.html
Social sharing using Javascript inserted in the page is not allowed, as no Javascript is allowed. If you want to use social sharing, use a non-javascript implemention, or try out the amp-social-share
thanks for the response. As per the query which I asked
Please ensure that all script tags are of type application/ld+json. There should be no executable code in these script tags - I am not using any Script as of now except amp only
Redirection is something that you must be doing on your end. Google doesn't do any sort of redirection from AMP to non-amp pages if the URL is hit directly. In fact that URL schema that Google uses in their carousel is entirely their own, and just includes the path to your page inside it. E.g. https://cdn.ampproject.org/v/www.yoursitehere.com/path/to/article.html -
Understood
Social sharing using Javascript inserted in the page is not allowed, as no Javascript is allowed. If you want to use social sharing, use a non-javascript implementation, or try out the amp-social-share - Implemented Social Share and its working fine
Can we implement AMP for eCommerce sites where a lot of JavaScript, forms, plugins can be included? As of my knowledge AMP wants to keep it simple and thus restrict as many JavaScript, form tag is not valid only. So is there any chance we can implement AMP on eCommerce sites.
We have a website with multiple markets and multiple language where we use canonical to avoid duplicate content.
A geoip matching script is used to redirect users to what we guess is their market by looking at their ip.
The problems occurs when we try to add a link on facebook to the site. Facebook crawls the canonical instead of the page url and links to wrong market due to geoip redirect.
Example:
Url /nl-nl/nl/locator
canonical /nl-nl/global/locator
en = language
fi = market/country
When a new user comes to /nl-nl/global/locator, we look at the ip and try to redirect the user to the market that the ip corresponds if the market has the language connected.
So far so good.
The problem is that since the facebook crawler is seen as a new visitor coming to /nl-nl/global/locator with a different ip than the person trying to create the link they wont get the same market and link unless the language is only used in one market and the user isn't in the same country. The content is the same but the market is wrong. instead of /nl-nl/nl/locator the facebook post links to en /nl-nl/be/locator
Essentially I would like facebook to ignore the canonical and use the specified url but I'm not sure if it possible or the correct path to solve this.
I'm having problem publishing actions (using OpenGraph) with tagged Google Places instead of Facebook Place. It should be straight forward according to the following document:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/location_tagging/#third_party
But every time I try to publish an action with place=http://GOOGLE_PLACE_URL I get the following error message:
The action you're trying to publish is invalid because the specified place 'http://GOOGLE_PLACE_URL' is invalid.
I've tried to put Google Maps, Google Places and Google+ Local URLs but all with the same problem.
Note: I could successfully publish actions when I set "place=Facebook_Place_ID".
Any help or hint is greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
I don't think Google's place pages have the markup necessary to support Open Graph
From the documentation:
Publishing actions with 3rd party places is similar to the location
tagging example above, except that you will pass in the url to another
site's place object.
The foursquare example in the documentation is defined as a place, as well as having the metadata foursquare uses:
https://foursquare.com/v/eataly/4c5ef77bfff99c74eda954d3
See Facebook's Debug Tool for that URL at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=https%3A%2F%2Ffoursquare.com%2Fv%2Feataly%2F4c5ef77bfff99c74eda954d3 - it clearly shows that foursquare's place is defined as og:type playfoursquare:venue and has location data available for Facebook - i suspect Google does not have this on their place pages
I have seen when you visit a profile on FB and click on link provided in
Contact Information --> Website
Facebook first take you to url format mentioned below
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nwaonfire.com%2F&h=BAQByDCFo
and then takes you to the site .
My question is why facebook does so, Iam asking because there is a place in my application where iam allowing users to enter website urls.
...and the reason for facebook using the mentioned link instead of linking directly to http://www.nwaonfire.com is that facebook is evil.
They want to know which links are popular, where their users are going and where the link came from.
I also see a format as http://www.facebook.com/l/BAQByDCFo/www.nwaonfire.com where the BAQByDCFo is a hash value.
URL encoding is done so that a second URL can be placed within the first's query string without breaking the original URL. For example, implying directory structure by using the "/" character or breaking out of name value pair by using "&". If you're going to be embedding a URL as a query string parameter, you must encode it first. How you do this will differ depending on the language you're working with but most web based frameworks have a native or library based function to easily do this.
I'm trying to implement a feature like that where a user inputs a url and when displaying that url I want to have a custom display (an embed object if it's a video from youtube, a thumbnail if it's an image link, title and excerpt of body if it's a normal link).
How can such a feature be realized?
There is a new idea called oEmbed that a few sites support (Flickr, Vimeo and a few others) that addresses this problem. oEmbed site
Otherwise, just check the site against a list of ones you pick and then pull out the relevant bits to construct an embed link.
I liked the idea of oEmbed a lot but unfortunately it doesn't has that much adoption yet.
oohEmbed tries to solve this issue by building oEmbed for many websites.
For the feature to work, it needs the server's interaction where I believe the following scenario is how it works
Assume that we have the site humanzz.com and that it provides such feature
A user enters a url on the humanzz.com's webpage and presses a button like facebooks' preview button
An AJAX call is made to a dedicated page on humanzz.com
humanzz.com does calls the remote website and gets its data
The AJAX call now returns the page's data (oEmbed JSON object)
This involves so much server's overhead.
I really wanted to do it using JavaScript as the server's role was only to bypass "Same Origin Policy"'s restrictions.
oohEmbed allows bypassing the server's step by specifying a callback parameter to oohEmbed so that the JSON object returned is passed to a callback function on your page.
An example illustrating this is as follows
Add a script tag dynamically to your page
< script type="text/javascript" src="http://oohembed.com/oohembed/?url=http%3A//www.amazon.com/Myths-Innovation-Scott-Berkun/dp/0596527055/&callback=myCallBack">< /script>
This would result in executing myCallback(oEmbedJSONObject) which is great.
The problem with that solution is you still have to have a fallback for websites that don't have oEmbed representations.
For the embedded things, I have been using auto_html ( https://github.com/dejan/auto_html) with great success (vimeo, youtube, images) and even added soundcloud myself. But I am still looking for a "thumbnail" generation with an image and text facebook-like.
I guess you have to construct it by yourself by manually parsing the kind of URL you get.
If it is an image url, well then you just have to rescale it and in case the user clicks on it, then handle that by opening the original one somehow.
If it is a link to some youtube video, then you have to take a look at how the embedding of Youtube videos works. You can just copy the code that is provided by Youtube itself, and then exchange the parts with the URL to the video with the URL you got from your user.
I did never implement something like that, but I assume it should work somehow like this.