Michael Roebuck's Blog

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Yahoo! Track Links Feature - updated

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

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Monetizing YouTube and Buying Links

Before going into how Google is going to monetize YouTube, this article was originally titled, "To Buy or Not to Buy Links" as it started out as a recap of the Search Engine Strategies conference session regarding buying paid links and whether they are bad or not.

For the first time since it's inception, I did not attend the Search Engine Strategies Conference in California. I thought I'd miss this show this year and catch up at the Chicago SES instead. In reading several blog posts and articles about the show, the session on buying links caught my attention. However, since I wasn't there, I didn't really think I should comment in detail. However, I will state a few paragraphs:

Search Engine Strategies had a session on Paid Links and Dave from rentvine.com made a video about the session. Apparently Google is still saying that buying links is bad. I can understand Google's point of view, but I can also see the flip side. An example is the rebuttal regarding commercial web sites. Most people don't link to commercial web sites and therefore they need to buy links. Fully understandable! But back to this video....

I received word on this video and when I first saw it, it was uploaded to YouTube 22 hours previously, has 852 views and was already awarded with a most linked award with 112 links. Today, about 15 hours later, it shows 1624 views with 423 links. A 90% increase.

Watch the video and you'll see that while the video is completely relevant for search engine topics, it has absolutely nothing to do with home rentals. What does Google say about this? Apparently creating a video such as the one below is creative and allowable. Even though the video has nothing to do with the company itself.

According to Matt Cutts from Google; If I understand correctly, his first sentence goes something like, Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is - Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes.

If buying paid links pollute the web, what does this video do? buying a link creates trash yet the video was created specifically for what? The web site rents homes? You think maybe link love? Apparently paid links create trash and clutter the Internet whereas non-related video's don't?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Or adopt one person's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy!

Ok, now about Google's monetization of YouTube. I've read several articles on Google's $1.65 Billion purchase of YouTube and how are they going to make money on the deal. Similar to eBay buying Skype, some people didn't see the connection.

Today I read a few articles on how Google is adding semi-transparent ads that appear as strips across the bottom of videos. The ads will show for 10 seconds and the watcher can either click on the ad to watch it or ignore it altogether. Watching the commercial will pause the video while the commercial is played. Interesting!

I guess these commercials work as Google is claiming as many as 5-10 times more people click on the video ads as click on regular display ads or other web site ads.

Great YouTube video showing how the ads look from Shawn Collins: