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

Fresh off the Yahoo! Store Blog: The official announcement of Yahoo! Web Analytics.

As Paul writes on the Official Yahoo blog.... "...Any merchant that has tried to set up full analytics on their store knows there are challenges to getting full tracking from entry page to order confirmation. Today, I am happy to announce that we have completed the first phase of our product integration with IndexTools to solve that problem. Announcing Yahoo! Web Analytics for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. Now merchants can enable analytics at the click of a button to capture full referral data, internal search keywords, step-by-step checkout conversion rates and filter and segment all of this to find meaningful actionable insights that translate into more revenue for their stores..."

Full post can be read here:
Introducing Yahoo! Web Analytics

IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Brandi and I had the opportunity to travel to Yahoo! a couple weeks ago for training on this new program. It wasn't new to us as we have been using a white label version of IndexTools for several of our clients for several years now. I was very excited to hear everyone could have the opportunity to use it.

If you have any questions regarding IndexTools or need help setting up, please be sure to let us know.

Labels: analytics, indextools, yahoo