What we have found is that if that page eventually breaks (and they do, many times when adding additional tracking parameters), Google will not necessarily be aware that the ad is going to a non-functioning page. So, your campaign may be driving costly clicks to pages that don’t exist or call your 404 page (another reason to customize that 404). This can be a major issue with online retailers who have thousands of products and are leveraging product pages as landing pages. A product is no longer listed or pulled due to lack of inventory and, without the proper notification to marketing, clicks come…budget spent…un-smiley faces.

Solution:
There is a great little tool by EasyTools.com call URL Checker that allows you to run check of all of the URLs from an CSV file.

The tool then identifies all of the broken links and you can take appropriate action from there.

We attended the GA Conversion Universiy last week and it was discussed why Google Analytics time on site numbers have jumped.

Google’s explanation is that Google Analytics is no longer counting visitors who bounce in their TOS calculation. They weren’t sure when the change took effect (they thought end of July). The Google folks agreed it should have been announced.

I think most agreed that this was a better way of measuring time on site becaues the way it was explained is that TOS is calculated is looking at the time between one page is called to the next. With those that hit the homepage and leave, they were getting zero values, bringin the TOS down – even if they spent a couple of minutes looking at your homepage, then left.