Campaign URL as Website Address?

[Ellen]

Never came across this before, but I have a client using Google's campaign builder to create a campaign tracking URL for Google Plus, and using this as the website address in the dashboard.

Assuming they did this purely for Google Analytics reasons, which seems redundant since I did a real-time test on another account and GA had no issue detecting the Google+ as the source.


Aside from the campaign URL being redundant, could this negatively affect performance?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Ellen,

Great question! Here are two resources for you to dive into. All your questions should be satisfied after reading these:

Seriously, Track Your Google My Business Pages

Will a Tracking URL Hurt Your Local Rankings in Google? | LocalVisibilitySystem.com

 

[James Watt]

To add to the excellent resources Colan linked to, I've personally used this kind of link with clients that I've had success with. I also had a self storage client for a while too, and noticed during my competitive research that Public Storage, in addition to having their act together and doing a fairly good job on their local SEO across the board, are also using campaign links in their GMB profiles (among other competition I've looked at too of course, but this one's the biggest, best ranking one I've seen that seemed to be doing a lot right). All that's just a leadup to say that I'm convinced linking to a campaign URL doesn't cause any issues, though I do think it's a good idea to take Dan's advice and make sure Google doesn't think it's a separate page.

 

[Ellen]

Thanks Colan!

 

[Ellen]

Thanks James! We do have rel="canonical" in place.