If your website has a particularly long or complicated address but you need a shorter, "friendlier" URL to use in marketing materials, you may request a special URL that can be used to reach your site, ie: https://go.uab.edu/5zbbl and https://go.uab.edu/news. We refer to these as "friendlies" or "redirects."
There are three types of redirects that are offered:
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GoLink Redirects
Digital Strategy & Marketing is working to transition most of our friendly URL requests to a URL shortener tool that give friendlies the prefix go, called "GoLinks." GoLinks is a service provided to the UAB community for shortening URLs in the uab.edu domain. Below are some of the benefits of using GoLinks over server-level redirects.
- Server-level friendlies and redirects slow UAB's web servers down, so using GoLinks removes the redirect from UAB's servers, resulting in faster web servers.
- Friendlies and redirects impact SEO for all UAB websites; using GoLinks helps improve UAB's rankings in search engines.
- GoLinks provide robust analytics to understand how visitors are accessing UAB's websites, which includes typing out a URL as well as accessing the page through search (Google, Bing, etc).
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Traditional Server-Level Redirects
Every visitor to every page of every site at www.uab.edu has to traverse a massive list of thousands of friendly redirects before being sent to their intended destination. This only takes a short amount of time — a few milliseconds on a good day — but as the list grows, so does the time it takes for our tens of thousands of visitors a day to get through the list. Multiply those milliseconds by the number of visitors, and that equates to a significant amount of time and server load. For this reason, we may limit the number of friendlies a particular group or unit can have. When a new friendly is requested, we may ask that you verify that previously requested friendlies are still needed in order to keep the list as optimized as possible.
Server-level friendlies will be considered on a case-by-case basis for institutional-level redirects, ex. degree programs or other items (such as uab.edu/elas).
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Site-Level Redirects
There are ways to create redirects within your site that you can maintain yourself. Contact us at go.uab.edu/websupport for more details.
UTM Tagging
UTM URL tagging helps UAB track all of our marketing and communications efforts. It provides insight into how people reach content on your website. Anytime you include a link to content on your website in social, email, or paid marketing, using a UTM tag can show you how effective your communications are by clearly tracking how people reached your content.
| Campaign Source - utm_source | Required. Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example: google, TargetX, Facebook |
| Campaign Medium - utm_medium | Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per-click. Example: cpc, email, paid social |
| Campaign Name - utm_campaign | Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. Example: utm_campaign=sp18_visit |
| Campaign Content - utm_content | Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL. |
The Office of Marketing and Communication has created a tool that allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so that you can track data in Google Analytics.