[thelist] PHP - Making All Links Unique (even to same page)

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Wed Jan 16 09:50:44 CST 2008


> -----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Mark MacInnes
> 
> Hello,
> 
> My development team has developed our own CMS over the past year or so.
> We've been asked by the Internet Marketing guys this morning to make every
> single link on a page unique, even if they're going to the same page, for
> tracking in Google Analytics etc. I'm not looking for code or anything,
> just
> wondering what ideas people think are the best.

My question is a bit deeper than that - what are they going to *do* with this information? What impact is it going to have on the site design, or any other activity?

The best they can get from this is some assumptions about how the page content drives the business, and there are better ways to track that (look at the sales funnel functionality in Google Analytics for one). Worst case, they're going to have a tonne of data that they're going to waste their time in analysing for no net gain. Like the Stasi - they knew the colour of any individual's socks on a given day, but couldn't predict the Wall coming down.

Better way to get them info on user flow through pages - some usability testing.

Cheers
Martin


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