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Hi,

You mean tracking when someone click on a mail link in a page that directly opens up their email client yes?

If so you can track it by adding some js to the link and declaring the click as either an event or a virtual pageview. You can then set up a goal based on the event/pageview to make it easier to track in analytics. This page details the setup (it is for download link tracking but the concept is the same).

Hi Bas,

You are 302 redirecting your initial url to your final url (www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate) and that is why your are not getting your data in analytics. The redirect is kicking in before anything gets recorded and your final url only has the utm_source set so that is all you are seeing.

It seems to be an issue with your redirection script since in the url below you have a 'NEXTURL' variable that looks correct:
**www.nhad.de/affiliate.aspx?NETWORK=ZANOX&NEXTURL=**http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139

But the final url you get to is
www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate (missing the rest of the utm variables)

Maybe the script is not parsing the & sign properly?
If you get the redirects to forward to the complete nexturl variable then your data will be recorded properly in analytics:
www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139

Hi Hitesh,

There is no technical problem in using both hreflang and canonical tags on the same page. As you mention in most instances the canonical will be self referencing and this setup is ok and causes no confusion for the spiders. It is also possible to cross reference languages in the canonical tag (for example canonical the en-gb to the en-in page or vice versa). This can get a bit tricky if you are not aware of the behavior which this can cause (check the answer to this question where David explains it in detail). But for addressing url variables using self referencing canonical tags within an hreflang setup, you are fine.

Hi,

The moz crawler should respect canonical urls and will not flag them as duplicate content as long as they are set up correctly. There should be no time lag in this process, if the tags are set up correctly then the next time you get a crawl report the canonicals should be recognized. If you are still seeing duplicate content issues then there might well be a problem in the canonical setup so it would be good to double check and make sure the canonicals are setup and working the way you expect them to be (Magento can be a bit of a nightmare with these kind of things!).

Hi,

The easiest way is probably to add paypal.com to your referral exclusion list in analytics. You can read more details on how this works here. Hope it helps!

Hi Justin,

Your QS is (partially) based on your final landing page (after the redirect in other words) so depending on your keywords/phrases that page might be more or less relevant then the original url, but the redirect itself should not be causing any negative quality score issues. What quality score details are you seeing in adwords? You could always experiment using both landing pages for a time to see what quality score the original page gets also and to see if there are any differences in the average cpc (if that is what you are worried about).

Hi Bhupesh,

You see these kind of links everywhere for almost any kind of site. I havent looked at it much but I think that some of them create pages when a user goes by and inputs a url for 'domain valuation' or 'seo evaluation' type reports, others might well be semi or fully automated so create pages based on some sort of crawl bot or from lists of registered domain names.

These are really really low value links though, so honestly I wouldnt waste your time actively trying to get them, some you will likely get without any action on your part, but again they are so low value that they are unlikely to give you any ranking benefit. As for why some of the sites you mention seem to be ranking from them, well I expect there is more there than meets the eye. Perhaps they are ranking for very low competition keywords and their onpage stuff is enough to get them there. Could be other reasons also but tough to say without examples.

Hope that helps!

HI,

If technically that is the best solution for your needs then a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. If you are using Universal Analytics subdomain tracking is included by default so if you put the same analytics code on your subdomain pages then you should not be seeing any 'bounces' -  google should be able to figure this out also.

2. You can install GWT for the subdomain also. I dont think you can set the preferred domain for a subdomain setup but you can use GWT to monitor issues and make sure that duplicate pages for the subdomain are not getting indexed.

3. To avoid indexing of the subdomain pages (which I assume you don't want) you could canonical them to their equivalent on the www domain. You could also meta robots no-index them all. If they creep in anyway you can use GWT to remove them.

If the subdomain is a complete clone and the experience is seamless then why not make all links on the subdomain go back to the www domain pages. That way the only pages available on the subdomain would be the ticketing pages and the rest would be on the www as normal.

Hope it helps.

Hi,

It can be confusing, but there is actually no difference! Still hasn't been phased out though

Hi,

Have you set up analytics tracking on the pages of your subdomain also? If you are using Universal Analytics then sub domain tracking should work as is - all you need to do is put the same analytics code from your main site in your subdomain landing pages and you should see the original referral data. I am not familiar with Marketo but if you set up the above and start seeing a lot of referral data to the subdomain which looks like mail clients (gmail, mail.xxx etc) then that would indicate that the tagging in the mail links is not set up well and in that case yes manually tagging them with utm parameters will work.

As mentioned above the exact CPC is going to vary based on a number of factors.

With a smallish budget you start off with a disadvantage against your larger competitors but this does not mean you cannot compete, you just need to think smart and target intelligently!

In addition to the BMM and call only campaigns mentioned I would suggest looking at even longer tail keywords (for example long term manhattan office space lease - I do not know the market but you get the idea, you can focus on areas of manhattan, types of office spaces etc).  The objective is to focus both your keywords and your ad groups very tightly and hopefully gain a competitive advantage against your larger competitors who might not be doing such tight targeting because they have the larger budget and therefore do not put in the extra effort (it happens more often than you might think!).

Tight targeting like this should allow you to get high quality scores on your keywords (hopefully reducing cpc) and at the same time help reduce irrelevant or more generic office leasing clicks that will just waste your limited budget. Negative keywords will also be important to avoid the 'shared' and 'short term' type searches, there will probably be a lot of relevant negative keywords!

If you set up your targeting very specifically then you should be able to get better qualified traffic at a better cpc and therefore hopefully a better conversion rate. This is important when you look at your numbers. They look correct if they are based on data you already have from your site, but consider what happens if ANY of those numbers change: If you get 1 contact for every 10 visitors instead of 15, if two out of ten are good leads instead of one out of ten, if your average cpc is 15 dollars instead of 20. Changing any of those numbers makes the situation look better, changing all of them makes it look A LOT better! You will only get real data once you try - just target intelligently to increase your chances of success!

Hi,

Just to add to Axel's reply you can check out how many tokens you are using and where by going to this link: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens

With all the services you may be logging into with google oauth they can really add up!

Hi Adam,

Are the ticket pages on the sub domain the same as the event pages on the main domain except with the ticketing system included? If yes it would make more sense to canonical each event ticketing page back to the same event page so: tickets.domain.com/event1 -> domain.com/event1.

If the ticketing pages are not meant to be indexed at all then I would put the robots no index tag on them also (or a robots file on the whole subdomain) and keep an eye on GWT to make sure none of them creep in. Canonical tags are a 'recommendation' not a rule so if your plans are for these pages to not be indexed at all best to ensure that as completely as possible.

Hi Oliver,

I'm sure it must be driving you mad!

I don't have any great ideas on what to do about it, but my gut says that it is algorithmic (for whatever that is worth) so I am not sure google would look at it as an error. A quick thought before (hopefully) one of the algorithm aces chimes in...

Is this trend more pronounced in books (for example) or specific product categories? I did a search for priceminister and then clicked on a couple of suggested searches (priceminister iphone4 and that kind of thing) and you were all over the place and amazon was not to be seen. I am just wondering if the specifics of a book title or something else like that is triggering this kind of serp result.

Wish I could be more help, it is an interesting case.

Hi Dan

I wouldn't think that the products not showing are because of categorisation but if the auto categories are not what you think they should be then it is always worth specifying. Not sure if there is an easy way to see what competitors are using but if the products are books I would definitely label them as such and not art supplies. Having a quick look at shopping results for 'colour palettes' shows a mix of books and colour samplers anyway so the overlap seems to be recognised by Google already.

In my experience one of the quickest wins in getting more impressions out of shopping ads are tweaking your product titles (and descriptions). If for example the title is just the title of the book, it can help if you prepend or append the title with something like 'Art Book' or 'Colour Guide' or similar. You can even do this through shopping feed rules if it is difficult to get it set up via your CMS. A bit of trial and error to see what works best is usually needed.

Hope it helps!

Hi Jonathon,

Well yes the big meta desc text is an issue, not great for google but even worse for user experience in term of a nice targeted description texts that show up in the serps and entice searchers to click on your site rather than the others. So you want a nice clear call to action text that says in 156 characters or less why users should check out your site (or more specifically this particular category/page of your site). Have a look at this serp preview tool, it is really useful: http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

As to the technical implementation, it sounds like you have a custom template in use and the description text is being put into the meta desc field also. It is an easy fix for you or your developer to switch that over to using the category meta desc field from the magento admin instead.

Hope that helps.

Hi Rose,

As Stefan says it is a parked domain (a domain which is either for sale or just not being used right now). The links in it are cpc ads which are likely sourced from adwords (and maybe elsewhere also). If you click through to say 'yoga retreats in costa rica' and then do a google search for the same phrase, you will see most of the same ads on both pages.

So basically, it is neither a real site nor a spam site, it is a parked domain showing ads. In that respect, you would have to set up an adwords account with the relevant key phrases and targeted to search partner networks to try to get a link on it, and as far as I know these links would never show up as backlinks in your site's profile. So apart from the (low in my experience) possibility of conversions from users finding your site through the parked domain, the value of the link is pretty much zero, but there is no danger of getting a penalty from having your site show up in the list since they are in all likelihood sourced from google's own adwords system.

Hi,

This article gives a pretty good rundown of the steps needed (well the intro bit and then straight to step 4). Look out for the cookieDomain: auto setting which is a bit of a gotcha in many cases. Technical reasons behind the cookie domain issue can be found here. Hope it helps!

Hi,

If the duplicated content urls are already in the google index then excluding them with the robots.txt will not remove them but just stop the google bot from crawling them again. You could do a bit of conditional logic on your head.phtml template file to check for the relevant url part and output a noindex,follow meta tag on the pages you don't want indexed. This is a more reliable way to make sure they are removed and not indexed in the future (be sure to test first!).

Hey Dan,

Ah, didn't clue in to the FREE shopping ads part! Standards best practices still apply though, check out this checklist for a good rundown of technical setup points to keep in mind: https://feedarmy.com/kb/requirements-for-enhanced-listings-on-surfaces-across-google/