Best Practice for tracking type in domains

typed in traffic forwarded to main site

[mobrando]

I have several .com domains that are one or two keywords pointing to my mainsiteexample.com . All of these domains are 301 redirect forwards to the same page: mainsiteexample.com/specific-page This page is also a link on the mainsiteexample.com index page.

I have the domains pointing to this page because I figure if someone types in typedindomainexample.com then that visitor is looking for the item found on /specific-page

I would like to find out exactly how much type in traffic I am receiving from each of these domains in G analytics. How do I do this?

If it isn't possible, would it be a good idea to still have them 301, but have a different url for each domain but with the same info on each landing page? So: mainsiteexample.com/specific-page-domain1

mainsiteexample.com/specific-page-domain2 and so on

It seems that if I did it this way these pages wouldn't be indexed which is fine, but they would appear in G analytics reports. Just wanted to avoid duplicate content.

[phranque]

you can get this information from the log files for each of the redirected domains.

[buckworks]

What might be the pros or cons of doing it like this?

mainsiteexample.com/specific-page#domain1
mainsiteexample.com/specific-page#domain2
mainsiteexample.com/specific-page#domain3

[phranque]

What might be the pros or cons of doing it like this?

mainsiteexample.com/specific-page#domain1

the bolded section of the url is a resource fragment identifier and isn't sent with the request to the server.
you might be able to do some tricks with javascript to send that information on a click event but with a regular click on an "<a href=" link, not so much...

[lucy24]

The question was originally about getting information from google analytics, right? There you do retain fragments; they're part of what gets tracked. (Don't know about GA, but I know piwik has an option for tracking requests for in-page fragments separately, vs. aggregating the whole page. No matter which you choose, there will be things you can only learn by doing it the other way.)

Logs at the originating site will record requests. But since the only response being served is a 301, it's hard to identify which ones are human requests that actually follow the redirect. You almost have to look at both sets of logs in parallel.

If the other sites have never existed independently, then I kinda doubt there would be many requests for exact pages, giving the full path with only the domain name wrong. I've got one domain that works the same way-- any request in .php gets redirected to the same page on the real domain-- but honestly I don't think it has ever happened. I do have analytics code on the front page, so I can see if any human ever follows the link that says in essence "You're probably looking for dot ca. This is dot com." (Yes, this was laziness. Easier to make the user download 26k of javascript rather than to write a few lines of code myself :()

[GeorgeK]

If you're using Google Analytics, it's very simple to do. Simply add:

?utm_source=example.com

to the link that you're redirecting to. Google has support pages about this, see:

[support.google.com...]
[support.google.com...]

[lucy24]

Inescapable follow-up question: Does gwt know to ignore the utm_source parameter, or will they have to be told?

I realize it's perfectly possible for someone to have a significant parameter whose name just happens to begin in utm_ but come on, let's be reasonable.

[mobrando]

Thank you for all of the great information!

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, mobrando!