Archive for March, 2009

MSN Conversion Inflated

Most marketers and agencies probably never noticed, but MSN’s tracking has always been unreliable. Here at LeadQual, we knew about this problem because we do what we can to trace every click down to the conversion or sale. We try to de-dup our tracking efforts and match the numbers just to be sure what we report is accurate.

Microsoft’s adCenter conversion has always been inflated, the script often firing multiple times each time a person would refresh the page, reopen the conversion page (bookmarking the receipt page) or back into the page. This causes major pains when trying to analyze the performance.

LeadQual Implements MSN Conversion Hack

Here at LeadQual we spent time and resources to implement a code hack into our conversion codes in order to more accurately record conversion data. It de-duped the data for such refreshes or accidental reopening of the page. It made us proud to know that we had a solution for this tracking issue that most people were not even aware of.

The New Conversion Tracking Options

Well that felt good while it lasted. Good news for everyone, MSN has finally caught up. They announced new tracking options that would allow the user to track utilizing different methods.
Read More about MSN adCenter’s New Conversion Tracking Options

With the recent introduction of the canonical link tag, search engines are starting to give us a pretty comprehensive set of tools to manage how a website is crawled and indexed.  These tools have been developing over time, and are a bit ad-hoc and overlap in confusing ways, but we now have some tools that solve some traditionally thorny SEO problems.

I thought it would be good to sit back and take inventory of these tools, and how we can use them.

First of all, here are some of the issues we’re trying to solve:

1. Keeping search engines from indexing pages we don’t want them to index.
2. Keeping search engines from crawling pages we don’t want them to crawl.
3. Keeping search engines from giving page rank to certain pages (whether on our site or on another site).
4. For pages that have variations in the URL due to parameters, capitalization issues, different pathways, etc, getting search engines to index just one version of that URL, and focus all page rank other URL formats get onto that one URL.
5. Removing pages from the index we’d like to get out.

To manage these issues, we now have some good tools:

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