URL design for campaign effectiveness
Jeremi Karnell, President & Founder | One to One Interactive
February 26, 2005
Introduction
There are two important questions that should be examined to
understand the best approach for developing and testing campaign
URLs:
- Should the URL be brand or campaign focused?
- Whats the appropriate length of a URL?
This paper will examine these two questions and conclude with
recommendations.
Should the URL be brand or campaign–focused?
The question to whether an enterprise should utilize a
campaign-focused URL vs. a brand URL has recently been addressed by
ClickZ in August of 2004. They recognized a major shift from
marketers to use campaign URLs.
Examples include:
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Burger King: haveityourway.com and
subservientchicken.com
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Mitsubishi: seewhathappens.com
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Subaru: need-desire.com
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Universal Studios: iwantmyvacation.com
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Lincoln Mercury: oneandonlyclearance.com
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Dish Network: stopfeedingthepig.com
ClickZ proceeded to ask industry experts if its better to use
a custom campaign URL or extensions of the brand URL? Advertiser
and agency staffers sent a total of 78 responses. Overall, they
reflect a preference for campaign URLs (61 out of 78). In summary,
the reasons were:
- If the primary objective is to promote a brand message, use a
specific URL that reflects the core idea of the brand message.
People will more readily remember it and type it into the
browser.
- You can leverage a theme line or message in a URL to drive
higher message awareness.
In addition to the above points, One to One also sees
significant value in campaign URLs to assist with measurement and
analytics. By securing campaign specific URLs, a marketer is
provided enormous opportunity to collect rich click-path data from
specific media channels to the landing page and on to the corporate
brand/ecommerce site. Furthermore, a campaign specific URL helps
easily delineate between those visitors who engaged as a response
to the campaign vs. natural traffic that would be driven to the
marketer's web assets in the normal course of business.
What's the appropriate length for a URL?
In general, any URL should be as short and as easy to remember
as possible. That being said, the media used to promote the URL
will impact users' different ways in their ability to recall the
address.
In traditional direct mail, prospects who are presented a
campaign-based URL are not required to remember or write down the
URL as it is already provided in print in the creative and may
easily be referenced when sitting down at a computer.
With radio and television, users are required to write down
or remember the URL provided. To that end, a campaign URL that is
easy to remember and spell is critical. Furthermore, it is not
suggested to provide URLs with a prefix or suffix on the URL (e.g.,
newcampaign.client.com or client.com/newcampaign) in this medium as
recent tests show that 70 percent of people will focus on the main
URL element, in this case client.com, and just type that into the
browser. The other 30 percent type the complete URL, including the
prefix or suffix. Finally, it is important to consider the impact
of search engines with your radio/TV drive to web tactics, since
some percentage of people will start their research for your
advertised product/service in place of typing in the URL provided
in the campaign.
Within digital media, the largest impact that URL length has
is on search indexing. In April of 2004, statistical analysis was
conducted within the two leading search engines to determine if the
actual length of a URL impacted it ranking on the results page. The
researchers counted the characters in the URL (including the
http://) and tabulated the results against the ranking of the URL
in the search results. The tabulated results were finally converted
into a normalized "ranking correlation." The results for each of
the two leading search engines were kept separate so that they
could discover any differences between the two leading search
engines for this factor. The resulting graphs show the results for
groupings of URL lengths normalized into a number between -100 and
+100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value
of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show
that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of
another value. A value of -100 shows that all 10 rankings were in
the proper order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS
rank LOWER than pages of another value.
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Search engine #1
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Search engine #2
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The result is very conclusive. Both leading search engines
rank sites having URLs between 11 and 30 characters (inclusive)
much higher than any other URL length studied.
A separate study conducted with Google compares the character
length of the URLs the engine indexes. This data is more a
reflection of how long URLs are on the net as a whole, than what
Google supports. However, URLs between 15-25 in character length
have the highest percentage of indexing.
Conclusion
One to One suggests the use campaign specific URLs within TV and
traditional direct response campaign test cells. Although we do not
see a risk in using prefix or suffix extension in any URLs executed
in direct response test cells, we would advise against this
structure for any TV, radio, or outdoor campaign.
Regarding recommending the appropriate URL length, One to One
suggests staying within 11-30 characters. Furthermore we suggest
securing those domain names that also contain the name of the
campaign site. A match between search term and site name increase
click-throughs, and search engines tend to give higher ranks to
URLs containing the search terms.
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