I'm having trouble understanding how to track qr codes in general with wechat if this was just a QR that leads to my personal website I would just do say mysite.com?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=Tyler and I would be able to see if because mysite is attached to my Google analytics account.
However with wechat the URL I have to use for the qr code looks something like this http://weixin.qq.com/q/02dz0Vxg6Weq110dddd00g03c as the QR URL The problem I have here is there is no way for me to track that URL since it is not my domain.
Do I need to have the QR code go to my site and setup a redirect there that leads to the wechat URL?
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Our email marketer is sending email from GetResponse with a tracking code generated from another tool,
but we can't see if the users are coming from the email source.
Is it possible, because it is with tracking code generated from other tool, GA to mark it as direct traffic and is there a way to know it is coming from the email campaign? Also, I am not sure it is tracking it at all, becouse I don't see much traffic in the landing page. The GA is fired, I checked!
The tracking code includes the main domain and it redirects to a specific page.
Example: tracking.ourdomain.com/aff_c?offer_id=46&aff_id=76
You have to check in Landing Pages report (or All pages report), filtering by aff_id, if there are any sessions.
To track in correct mode the source you have to use UTMs parameters. You can build your URL with UTM parameters using this tool. It allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can track Custom Campaigns in Google Analytics. Then you can find those sessions in source / medium report.
I want to share links like www.domain.com/twitter/headline where twitter/headline represents the link I put in my twitter headline. Then I use something like nginx to configure what would happen. I want to redirect the source to an external page like a profile and I want to track how many people clicked the link with something like bitly or google analytics or does anyone know an elegant solution for my use case?
Problems with bitly
1. You can not have two links for the same destination. So let's pretend I have domain.com/twitter/a and domain.com/twitter/b and both redirect to two bitly links that forward to my linkedin profile. This does not work.
Problems with Google Analytics
1. ga is not made to track redirects. it can track where the traffic comes from but since I forward to external sources like linkedin I cannot put a ga code on my linkedin profile to do it.
I am not sure to understsand the entire flow.
You can use a service like anytrack.io.
it will track the incoming traffic landing on your page (very much like GA does), and
track the outbound clicks to wherever you send the visitors.
Then it will tie the events to your GA account.
Not sure if that's what you wanted to do...
Lets say I want to advertise a link to a blog, app link etc, and I want to put that link on my business card using QR code.
Are there any services out there that I can attach a tag to the link so I would know if user runs the URL, it would know it came from the business card?
UTM parameters are what you are looking for.
This article gives a good overview of what UTM parameters are and how to use them.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863?hl=en
You can also use this Campaign URL Builder created by Google Analytics.
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
So we're doing some tracking and I've setup some links to be tracked via bit.ly. I've also created some QR codes.
So, we scanned the codes using QR Reader, the #1 QR scanning app on the app store, and none of the hits were coming in through bitly. So we decided maybe it had to do with the fact that I made bit.ly links and then made QR codes from those, rather than using bit.ly's built in QR code creator (which we just found). Tried with the new codes, still nothing on bit.ly's site.
I downloaded a different scanner (QR Scanner) and it records everything as normal.
Does anyone have insight into this, done this before, know of a work around? I can't force my users to not use a particular QR scanner.
I mean, unless I'm crazy, when I hit a bit.ly link, their server goes and looks up what the URL is based on the code and redirects me. How the F! can that process happen without bit.ly recording the event?
bit.ly is not a reliable way to get usage statistics for a URL.
For best results, you should use the facilities provided by the web server itself.
Since you don't control bit.ly you can't control how they count hits.
I believe the QR Scanner program is performing a HEAD request instead of a GET request to validate the URL scanned. Since a HEAD will return re-direct information and is not (and should not be) counted in "hit" statistics you wouldn't see the hit on the bit.ly statistics.
While frustrating for your goals, this is one of the features that make QR Scanner better than other programs, you don't want to do a full GET when a HEAD will work.
Merely scanning a QR code containing a URL does not necessarily do anything to the URL. A simple app would do nothing at all. It would show the bit.ly URL to the user and wait for the user to confirm that he/she wants to access the URL. Then of course the browser would access the URL.
Some apps like Barcode Scanner on Android will access known URL redirectors to show the user what's behind the redirect before proceeding. It will issue a HEAD request after just scanning the QR code.
I would not expect any app to issue a GET just on scanning. It's unnecessary to read the redirect. And if the app is sending the user straight to the URL after scanning, that's a bit of a security risk.
A couple of things to check would be GET/HEAD and the User-Agent. If the QR reader is sending a strange, or no, user-agent header, it might get accidentally considered a bot click.
If you generate a bitly link - http://bitly.com/test - and then turn it into a QR code using a 3rd party service, you won't see any stats about whether scans have come from a QR code.
If you use the bitly QR generator - http://bitly.com/test.qr - you will get a QR code with a different url in it.
In this case
http://bitly.com/test?r=qr
It is that r=qr part which is recording whether the click came from the QR code.
So, to clarify, you share the link "http://bitly.com/test" on Twitter / Facebook / etc. You share "http://bitly.com/test?r=qr" via QR code. That way you can track where hits are coming from.
I want to make a site that uses QR codes, and for user analytics I want to see how many people access it through the code, but I don't want a GET parameter for this because I don't want any URL guessing giving me incorrect stuff. Any way to detect QR code access?
No.
Besides something in the URL, you only really have the headers. For example, if you assume all mobile traffic to the URL is from a QR code reader, you could sniff for a mobile User-Agent header. Doesn't seem very robust, tho.
Not really, but you can use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to collect analytics.