Digital Content Marketing Blog

One of the most impactful tactics in communication and in marketing is the use of personalization. We’ve known this for centuries. The only thing that changes are the tools we use to communicate. Whether it be written, visual, audible, digital or physical you can add personalization that will produce better results no matter what the desired outcome is for you and your organization.

What we’re going to talk about specifically in this article are PURLs, or PURL Marketing and PURL Direct Mail with when fully spelled out and not used as an acronym is Personalized URL Marketing and Personalized URL Direct Mail.

What is a PURL?

A PURL is a Personalized URL or more specifically a Personalized Uniform Resource Locator. A PURL is used by companies and marketing agencies to create a unique, branded and efficient experience for those who engage with the link. Some people will call Personalized URLs vanity URLs which is technically true but in most cases vanity URLs are simply the use of a domain name purchased exclusively for a marketing campaign. So they are similar to PURLs but have that nuanced difference.

The structure of a PURL is commonly built as follows https://www.domain.com/PersonalizedPart or https://PersonalizedPart.domain.com

Either structure works it’s just one PURL uses a subdirectory and the other uses a subdomain for the Personalized part of the URL.

*Just a quick note PURL actually stands for Persistent Uniform Resource Locator, but Personalized makes way more sense under the use cases we describe and how you’ll be using them.  And we don’t think you’ll be confused at this point but we’re not talking about PURL in knitting.

What is PURL Marketing?

PURL Marketing when you use a Personalized URL on any marketing channel, then when clicked, typed or scanned will bring you to a unique landing page that has been created specifically for that PURL. You’ll typically find PURL marketing being used on printed materials such as promo products, swag bag contents, postcards and direct mail.

You can get really creative here because if you put in the time a PURL Marketing effort can not only use the PURL for personalization, but you can also include that same personalization on the landing page. Think about using variables such as first name, last name and other variables specific to the customer or prospect.

You’ll find that PURL Marketing will generate better results.

You can also apply this to any number of recipients whether it’s 100 or over 1 Million recipients. If you are using first name and last names you’ll obviously run into duplicates such as www.domain.com/JohnSmith PURL software can recognize that and create numbered versions to differentiate such as www.domain.com/JohnSmith2 , /JohnSmith3, etc.

This also allows you to track your performance better and more granularly.

What is PURL Direct Mail?

PURL Direct Mail is form of PURL Marketing but specifically focused on the direct mail aspect where the recipients are getting postcards, brochures and letters in the mail. Imagine getting a printed card in the mail with some offer and the offer states that you can claim it now by going to www.domain.com/YourName. This will catch the attention of the recipient and get them to visit that URL more than a non-personalized URL.

We do have to mention that you can also do this with QR Codes. Those same PURLs on the direct mail piece can also be embedded in the QR code so it generates a frictionless personalized experience.

The cost to run PURL Direct Mail doesn’t have to be any higher than other direct mail methods. There is software that makes this very simple.

PURL Software Options

While it is possible to create PURLs manually, if you have a lot of different PURLs to create then you have to use PURL software to make it happen. So why should you use PURL software? Because it makes the process easier and more cost efficient.

Here we’ll look at a number of PURL software options that you could start using today.

• EasyPurl ( www.easypurl.com )
• Boingnet ( www.boingnet.com/purl-software/ )
• PURLem ( www.purlem.com )

Any of these PURL software solutions will work well for your needs. There are other options out there but many are tied to those who print and we doubt you’re looking to work with competitors.

The main takeaway here is that PURLs are an easy way to generate better results in your marketing. Go do it!

If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422

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l.facebook.com is a referred click from a link that has been shared on Facebook.

The best way to describe how the l.facebook.com referral shows up in Google Analytics is to think about when you post or share on Facebook. If you were to write a Facebook post that included a link to your website, shared it to your feed and someone clicked on that link, the click and resulting traffic to your website can result in the l.facebook.com source to show up in your Google Analytics account. The same thing can happen if you write and publish a post, but then a connection shares your post and someone else clicks on the link, the same thing can occur whereas l.facebook.com (technically in this scenario lm.facebook.com) will show up in your reporting.

This can also happen on both Mobile and Desktop versions of Facebook, so in the app, on a mobile site or a full desktop experience.

Mobile and App m.facebook.com and lm.facebook.com

Something that websites used to do in the past for SEO and for user experience was to create a mobile only version of the website and most of them would use the subdomain of m. to represent mobile. Today many sites will use responsive design so they don’t need a separate site to maintain for mobile. But Facebook uses m.facebook.com for their mobile site. When a link gets clicked  here them you will most likely see the lm.facebook.com referral source in your Google Analytics account.

What is the Difference Between Facebook.com and l.facebook.com?

There really is no difference. These are simply different ways that Facebook has sections of their website and service operating on different servers, tracking link clicks and attributing behavior to their own systems.

l.facebook.com vs lm.facebook.com vs m.facebook.com vs web.facebook.com vs business.facebook.com

Again these are all basically the same with the exception of the business.facebook.com subdomain. That one is specific to the Meta Business Suite product that can be used to better manage a Facebook Page, users, permissions, ads, apps, etc.

Here is a short list of a number of referral sources related to Facebook that you’ll find in Google Analytics

• Facebook.com
• m.facebook.com
• l.facebook.com
• lm.facebook.com
• web.facebook.com
• our.intern.facebook.com
• business.facebook.com

If you have more questions about these Facebook referral sources showing up in your analytics platform, then definitely reach out!

If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422

Or Submit your information below

If you are currently using Google Analytics and have logged into the platform with the last 9 months then you are likely aware that as of July 1, 2023 Google Analytics UA or GA 3 as some call it will be “Sunsetted”. Essentially Google is going to stop tracking much of the critical data it collects currently in Google Analytics UA in a move to force everyone to start using the new Google Analytics 4 or GA 4 platform. So naturally you’ll want to ensure that you have GA 4 set up for your website.

As a part of that set up you will want to ensure you have events being tracked that you can measure and some of them will be used as conversions / goals just like you do in Google Analytics today.

You can either create those manually or you have the option of migrating the Google Analytics events from with UA over to GA 4 using a migration tool. But this is why we decided to create this blog. It doesn’t always work!

What Problems Will You Experience Migrating Google Analytics UA Events over to GA 4?

You are most likely going to run into issues when using the events migration tool inside of Google Analytics. When using the tool you’ll even get messages telling you that some event types can’t be migrated because they aren’t compatible. One of those are events / goals that utilize regular expressions (many of our do, so we were screwed on that one).

But what we found is that very few of the events we migrated over to GA 4 actually worked. The migration itself would be successful in that there were events which appeared inside of the GA 4 property, but they would never work. No data would track and they were essentially worthless.

So we had to go back and create all of those manually. Some of them we could create within the GA 4 platform alone and other we had to build out using a combination of both GA 4 and Tag Manager (such as Click to Call phone number clicks tracked as an event and conversion).

Something different about events inside of Google Analytics 4 is that you have to “Toggle” events to be marked as conversions. Which is nice because you can more cleanly have a bunch of events being tracked while quickly marking which of them actually count as a conversion for your organization.

We just wanted to give you a heads up if you are going down this journey and to let you know that you’re not crazy if you run into problems like this. Because you will!

If you need help setting up or migrating Google Analytics over to GA 4 then contact us and we can easily help you out with that.

If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422

Or Submit your information below