Redirect to page for KPI/marketing purpouses

Question

I have a website with several articles and optimized seo urls. I want to add an url reference to those articles from a paper source.

1) i need a new url pointing to that articles, so I can see from the analytics how many people go to the online blog post from the paper source

2) I need to be able to shorten the url that will go to paper without altering the original post url

Example:

original url with content: www.mysite.web/original-content-url-too-long-to-write-on-paper

paper url: www.mysite.web/gohere1

When i go to www.mysite.web/gohere1 i want to get redirected to www.mysite.web/original-content-url-too-long-to-write-on-paper

How can I accomplish this? it is good to use 301 redirect? I'm not sure of it. There is any plugin that can help me to do this? Is the redirection plugin good for what I need to do?

Answer 1

Yes, you should use 301 redirects. There are quite a number of plugins that will do this. I would suggest trying a handful of different redirect plugins and seeing which one works best for your case. The main differences are that some will automatically include "/go/" at the beginning of the URL just to make sure you don't have conflicts with actual URLs, and some appear in different wp-admin menus, so if you have multiple site users you may prefer one plugin that appears in a certain place to either enable more users to set them up, or less users if you want to restrict who has accesss.

In any of these plugins, you type in the short URL which you'll be printing, then put in the long URL which includes the full permalink plus GA UTM parameters, which you can either just type in or use Google's Campaign URL Builder to generate. The plugin will handle redirecting from the short print version to the longer query-string version which is what will feed the data into Google Analytics.