Background
Mason has developed a video advertisement – Make Great Happen – which will play on NBC sports affiliate television networks during the Atlantic-10 conference.
Driving Traffic to Our Website From This Ad
In order to help drive traffic to our website from this ad, we are including a dedicated ‘vanity’ URL which will be displayed at the end of the video.
To encourage viewers to visit this URL, it should be concise, memorable, easy to type.
This vanity URL will be set-up to redirect users to our website.
Measuring Traffic to Our Website From This Ad
In addition to simply transferring users from the vanity URL to our website, the redirect will also add identifying campaign-tagging parameters to the redirect URL. This will enable Google Analytics to identify which incoming traffic was specifically a result of the redirect from the vanity URL on this television ad. This will will enable us to measure how many visits to our website were a result of people seeing this ad.
Note: because the URL redirection will automatically add the specified campaign-tagging parameters every time the vanity URL is used, whatever URL we use on the end of the video can ONLY be used on the video. If we were to use the same URL anywhere else, any visits resulting from these other sources would be incorrectly attributed to the video.
Redirect Specifications
The vanity URL we will include at the end of the video is: greathappens.gmu.edu/A10
This will redirect to the Mason homepage: www2.gmu.edu/
The campaign-tagging parameters we will be using are:
Medium: tv
Source: nbcsports-a10
Campaign: greathappens
Putting this all together, the full redirect URL will be: www2.gmu.edu/?utm_medium=tv&utm_source=nbcsports-a10&utm_campaign=greathappens
Other Considerations
URL Variations
If we want to do more with the greathappens.gmu.edu vanity URL in the future – for example in other marketing efforts beyond this one specific video – we can create additional greathappens.gmu.edu URLs with different short additions to the end of the URL.
For example, if we were to do an associated radio ad on WTOP under this same campaign/theme, we could use a vanity URL of greathappens.gmu.edu/WTOP.
Catch-All Redirection
To make sure we redirect the user appropriately even if they forget the extra bit added to the end of the vanity URL (“/A10”), we will set-up an identical redirect on the base vanity domain: greathappens.gmu.edu. For the time being, we will use the same redirect parameters for redirects from both greathappens.gmu.edu and greathappens.gmu.edu/A10.
If we end-up doming more with the greathappens.gmu.edu vanity domain in the future, we would likely revise the redirect on the base domain to disambiguate it from the “/A10” version.
Summary
We will set-up two redirects with the following specifications:
Redirect/Vanity URL 1: greathappens.gmu.edu/A10
Redirects to: https://www2.gmu.edu/?utm_medium=tv&utm_source=nbcsports-a10&utm_campaign=greathappens
Redirect/Vanity URL 2: greathappens.gmu.edu/
Redirects to: https://www2.gmu.edu/?utm_medium=tv&utm_source=nbcsports-a10&utm_campaign=greathappens