Beware of Google Adwords, Google Analytics and a Lotus Domino based CMS....
Tags: Domino CMS
One of our customers, who is using our Lotus Domino based web CMS framework (quick2web) recently requested to add Google Analytics to the web analysis tools already in use. Adding this was no big deal, and the customer was very happy to get some more flashy information about the website usage.
All was well. But the customer was wondering, why the Google Adwords usage was not counted at all (and to have that information was the main motivation to use Google Analytics!).
So he asked Google about this, and got the following response:
You cannot really understand this unless you know exactly what is going on, even if you are a German native speaker. I asked Google for a translation into English, to have a similar nonsensical sentence - grammar errors are copyright of the Google translation process:
There were some more sentences who finally helped us to guess what was going on:
If you configure your Google account to use Google Analytics it will automatically start adding a URL parameter to all Google Adwords clicks (which will be processed by Google Analytics). I. e. if you have a Google Adwords campaign pointing to "http://www.yourwebsite.com/db.nsf/view/page" it will add "?gclid=something" to that URL. Which will totally confuse any Lotus Domino server, as the first URL parameter is interpreted as an URL command always. If you tell Domino to "gclid" something instead of to "open" it (as in the default URL command "?open"), Domino will return an error page (500 - internal server error: Invalid URL exception) to you. (In our case the users got a somewhat more friendly error page, suggesting to go to the homepage, the sitemap, search for your words or to open a contact form).
Which translates to:
Our customer paid several thousand Euros for potential customers clicking on adwords, who got a "Sorry, that does not make sense" response.
He is not amused at all.
The Google support stated:
(which translates to:)
I find it hard to believe that Google knows that this automatic behavior can lead to problems, but still changes the configuration automatically without letting you know, to let exactly this happen. I would expect a safe approach, e.g. that Google Analytics would show an information in the Google Adwords section, telling the user that a requirement for contents in this area is a configuration change (which might lead to problems).
One of our customers, who is using our Lotus Domino based web CMS framework (quick2web) recently requested to add Google Analytics to the web analysis tools already in use. Adding this was no big deal, and the customer was very happy to get some more flashy information about the website usage.
All was well. But the customer was wondering, why the Google Adwords usage was not counted at all (and to have that information was the main motivation to use Google Analytics!).
So he asked Google about this, and got the following response:
Ich habe Ihr Anliegen mit einem Google Analytics-Spezialisten untersucht. Dieser hat mir mitgeteilt, dass der Grund weshalb Sie keine Daten in Ihrem Analytics-Konto haben derjenige ist, dass Ihre URLs "gebrochen" wurden durch das Auto-Tagging und daher keine Daten gespeichert werden konnten.
You cannot really understand this unless you know exactly what is going on, even if you are a German native speaker. I asked Google for a translation into English, to have a similar nonsensical sentence - grammar errors are copyright of the Google translation process:
I have reviewed your concerns with a Google Analytics specialists. This has informed me that the reason why you are not in your Analytics account is the one that your URLs "broken" by the car were tagging and therefore no data could be stored.
There were some more sentences who finally helped us to guess what was going on:
If you configure your Google account to use Google Analytics it will automatically start adding a URL parameter to all Google Adwords clicks (which will be processed by Google Analytics). I. e. if you have a Google Adwords campaign pointing to "http://www.yourwebsite.com/db.nsf/view/page" it will add "?gclid=something" to that URL. Which will totally confuse any Lotus Domino server, as the first URL parameter is interpreted as an URL command always. If you tell Domino to "gclid" something instead of to "open" it (as in the default URL command "?open"), Domino will return an error page (500 - internal server error: Invalid URL exception) to you. (In our case the users got a somewhat more friendly error page, suggesting to go to the homepage, the sitemap, search for your words or to open a contact form).
Which translates to:
Our customer paid several thousand Euros for potential customers clicking on adwords, who got a "Sorry, that does not make sense" response.
He is not amused at all.
The Google support stated:
Bei bestimmten Websites sind URL-Parameter nicht zulässig. Auf diesen Websites wird eine Fehlerseite als Ergebnis angezeigt.
(which translates to:)
For certain websites URL parameters are not acceptable. An error page will be shown as result on these websites.
I find it hard to believe that Google knows that this automatic behavior can lead to problems, but still changes the configuration automatically without letting you know, to let exactly this happen. I would expect a safe approach, e.g. that Google Analytics would show an information in the Google Adwords section, telling the user that a requirement for contents in this area is a configuration change (which might lead to problems).
Comments
have you tried the setting "Make this site accessible to web search site crawlers" in the server document?
It should change the "?" in the URL command to "!".
Posted by Bernd Hort At 10:32:31 On 12.03.2008 | - Website - |
no, as this would break several other things in the websites (we are using URL commands for searching and other purposes ourselves).
The solution was to have the customer add an "?open" to the URLs he entered in Google Adwords - this ensures that the first URL Parameter is the valid Domino URL Command. Google is smart enough to add it's own parameter with a & in front, so that the URL used will have the format
www.yourwebsite.com/db.nsf/view/doc?open&gclid=something
which is fine for Domino and Google.
Using this approach the pages are shown and the adcklicks are counted in Google Analytics.
Posted by Hans-Peter Kuessner At 10:49:10 On 12.03.2008 | - Website - |
My question: At what point did you/others experience this Domino issue? That is, did Google change its system [in Feb or March of 08] which caused this?
We are close to seeking legal remedies.
Posted by Adam D At 21:33:23 On 16.09.2008 | - Website - |
Posted by null At 18:19:01 On 31.10.2008 | - Website - |