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Hi, I have noticed in Google analytics that direct traffic of one of my website is increased drastically. I didn't participate in Email Marketing or any other paid campaigns however direct traffic is continuously increasing. I checked all sources, locations, browsers, filters etc but didn't get any findings. Please help.

Hello! Our marketing team is testing paid online ad networks (banner ads, mobile ads and video ads) this year in addition to some traditional television advertising. We would like to track how effective these various ads are, and I'm wondering the best method to do so. In all cases, we're not setting up new pages for these ads to go to. They will simply go to an existing page on our site. For tracking purposes, here's what I'm wondering... If we set up custom URLs on our site (e.g. www.example.com/sports) then have the visitor immediately redirected to the intended page on our site (typically our home page), will Google Analytics show that custom URL in any report to see how much traffic flowed through it? Or will it not register because a page doesn't really exist for that URL? The biggest issue is with the banner ad network, which targets around ten categories of sites (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). I know I'll be able to find the network listed as a referrer to see the total traffic the network sent us, but we would like to know specifically which category drove the visits. As such, would a custom URL for each category work, or will Google Analytics not pick it up because it's not hitting an actual page? For television ads, we are showing our URL as www.example.com/tv, which would then redirect to the intended landing page. In this case, it's a little more challenging because I won't have the referrer traffic to go by. But same problem... will GA recognize that URL and show it in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages? I hope this makes sense. If not please let me know and I'll try to explain. Thanks in advance,
Erik

Hi all - I am just starting the 2nd month of a two month free trial. So far I have run advanced reports snooping at the dofollow backlinks of other bloggers in my niche to get an idea of where they're getting their backlinks from. I have also been looking at top pages of lots of blogs in my niche to get an idea of what the most popular content is. What else should I be trying out during my free trial period? Note, I'm not selling anything directly on the site. I'm looking to increase visitors, comments etc.

My client has clean links in edit from nytimes.com. The links do not have nofollow tags. Google Webmaster stopped including links from nytimes.com in the external linking domains report and we don't know why since the URL is still live. The nytimes.com URL includes this tag in the source code: Are links on pages with NOARCHIVE still counted in Google Webmaster linking domains reports?

If someone has set: the default url in Google Analytics to a non-www address (http://mysite.com) then placed the UA tracking script from that GA account within the CMS framework of the website... ... and then set the permanent 301 redirect in the htaccess file to redirect to the www address (http://www.mysite.com). How less accurrate will my GA analytics measurements be considering the default url within GA is non-www and the permanent 301 redirect in htacess is to the www-address? Anyone know how reliable GA reports are until the default url in GA analytics is changed to match what is the redirected url in htaccess file? _Cindy