Double Check Your Redirects, Track It, and Optimize

One of the common things to check what’s working or not is the traffic driven from redirects. It is quite astonishing to know how many redirects could exist, but people forget to manage because it is so easy to create.

Typically these redirects (e.g. example.com/tv) would take users to a landing page without having to depend on the users to memorize the entire URL string.
You’ll typically find them redirects used on TV ads, prints, radio, etc.

The objective of this article to bring the awareness that redirects could cause various issues including hidden actionable data that you could be missing out. This is a common culprit for big companies where they’re opening redirects left and right, but never manage to close it or redirect it to new page.

What are the common implications for not managing the redirects correctly.

• If there is no campaign ID assigned to the redirect, you won’t be able to properly assess how much that redirect is driving traffic to your site. It could be tracked under “direct” traffic in the traffic source report.
• It could be leading traffic to 404 error page because landing page has been killed, but redirect continues to drive traffic.
• You could be loosing a lot of opportunity to convert the visitors because the landing page is not optimal.
• Multiple redirects to same page with different campaign IDs attached to each URL. That could cause some issue with SEO, because same content could potentially be indexed or URL with camapign ID will be indexed and organic search traffic will counted as a campaign traffic.

To understand how much traffic is driven from a particular redirect, make sure have the campaign ID assigned to it. So in your 301 redirect file, make sure the destination page contains the ID tag. For google analytics, it would be the utm_ tracking codes. Here is a URL builder page you can leverage: Tool: URL Builder for Google Analytics

Make sure you have your IT department or engineer in charge could provide you with the full list, so you can understand what redirects are driving how much traffic and conversions.

Then check the bounce rates and see if the landing pages are still valid. Is it a redirect from old campaign to a landing page that no longer exists? Take to some where relevant, and test it if you can if it is driving significant amount of traffic.

In this redirect optimization plan, landing page is the key. Since the redirects contributing traffic are contributing traffic for reasons. For example, It could be placed on another sites or blogs, book marked, etc. Therefore, direct them traffic to some where relevant; if it was directing traffic to a Product A under Category A, you could potentially redirect that traffic to Product B or landing page of Category A, only if that original landing page Product A does not exist anymore.

Another point is, make sure the landing page is specifying canonical link so that the page will not be indexed including the campaign ID. Here is a great article from Google’s blog that describes this; Specify your canonical – by Google Webmaster Central Blog

Optimization does not only happen on creative, landing page doing A/B or MVT tests, but it could be done with significant impact on your bottom-line; by reviewing and taking action on fixing your redirect strategy.