Michael Roebuck's Blog

Do you have an analytics program? You know, something that tracks your revenue generated from an E-mail, Pay Per Click, or some other kind of marketing campaign? If you are using Yahoo Merchant Solutions you do. Well, kind of.

Log into your store manager and look at your "create links" and "track links" options on the lower left hand corner under the the "Promote" heading.

This is actually a type of affiliate program Yahoo! offers but we use it to track revenue for various marketing campaigns. It's easy to use as well. Simply "create" a link and then use the link that Yahoo! generates as your destination URL for your marketing campaign.

You can even change the last part of the URL, or page to be any page on your site. Simply replace "index.html" with your landing page such as "specialpage.html".

For example, the Yahoo! generated link will look something like:
http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?yhst-1234567+AWP5cr+index.html
You can modify the landing page by altering to look like:
http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?yhst-1234567+AWP5cr+specialpage.html

Don't want to use the store.yahoo.com domain? You can customize the link further by using your domain name that is attached to your store. The link will then look something like:
http://mydomainname.com/cgi-bin/clink?yhst-1234567+AWP5cr+specialpage.html

Remember, the track link will only work on the domain registered with the Yahoo store.

When creating the link in the Yahoo! Store manager, you can also use basic html functions to make the link bold or different colors. This is nice to help differentiate various campaigns.

BE CAREFUL! Yahoo error page (404), by default, redirects to the index page if a URL is not found. Try using tracking links with a specific page to ensure that specific page shows up. Otherwise, you won't know if the tracking link worked correctly or you were redirected to index page because of error 404.

To view the results of the track link, view the "track links" section.

A few uses of the track link function include Email Campaigns, Pay Per Click campaigns, Banner ads or links from other websites, testing link placement usability on your own site, and on and on. Anywhere you want to view revenue or traffic generated from a static link.

I wrote about this back in 2006, but it is still an important tool in your toolbox! My previous post can be read here: Yahoo! "Track Links" Feature

Labels: analytics, create, links, tracking