Redirection + Google Analytics events: how to show the true link in reports

Hello,

First of all thank you for creating and maintaining this plugin and providing amazing support and replies in the plugin forum.

Short version:

We use Redirection to manage affiliate links and have a clean looking outgoing link.

However, this means that currently only the clean link clicks/events show up in our analytics reports and not the actual affiliate links behind the clean link.

Do you have any suggestions to remedy this by us changing a setting or creating a filter for the plugin or another solution that will work in combination with the Redirection plugin?

We’ve listed potential solutions we’re looking at below (see the end). But maybe you have a better suggestion.

Longer version:

Example:
https://www.example.com/hop/best-juicer
which will redirect to the actual affiliate link taking users to a juicer product page at an online store.

It’s a large website, we avoid using store names in the clean affiliate link to keep editorial changes required to a minimum.

We have Google Analytics tracking set up so we can see these affiliate clicks as Events in GA by tracking all links with /hop/.

However, the reports only show the clean url that was clicked first /hop/best-juicer/ and not the affiliate urls behind it.

Fairly regularly the destination page will change to a different juicer model or different store. So 1000 clicks on /hop/best-juicer/ may lead to different products and especially stores over the course of one or more months.

Possible solutions we’ve been suggested or thought of are:

– adding an html attibute to the link. Not desirable as it’s too much work to do manually (thousands of webpages) and not much different from adding a store slug to the clean outgoing link.

– adding an outgoing gateway page with a GA tracking code on it that will track the actual affiliate link clicks.

– importing the Redirection plugin log rss feed into Excel and generating our own reports there to see exactly how many clicks we get to specific stores.

Thank you in advance for any additional suggestions or advice you’re willing to offer us.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by tfmwa.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by tfmwa.