It’s a small world, I just finished Chapter 3 (Campaigns) of my upcoming Yahoo! Web Analytics Book. A chapter where I actually spend a whole section on how to Identify Campaigns. Sent it to Wiley yesterday and received this alert today.

Great post and you are spot on. If I may add, you actually have a third opportunity, which is to pass on a the tracking string value in a variable _S_CMPQUERY. Thus outside the URL. (these variables will change in the upcoming release)

As an example where we might have a campaign use the following landing page URL to catch it:

visualrevenue.com/example/dennis.html?campaign=1.

And we envision that this is redirected to a permanent campaign URL as follows:

http://www.visualrevenue.com/example

Putting you in a situation where you might not be able to use the referring URL, you cannot use the landing page URL and there are no URL parameters to analyze. This is exactly a case where you would use the _S_CMPQUERY variable, having it equal the original campaign tracking string. Thus implementing (applying the following variable to the tracking script)

var _S_CMPQUERY=’campaign=1’;

This instrumentation will forward the campaign tracking information to IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics without having the tracking string displayed in the URL.

Cheers .. and have a great weekend
d.

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!
Blog: http://visualrevenue.com/blog
Book: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-analytics-book