The feature was requested by several users.  I didn’t see the need for it up front because I don’t do a heck of a lot of AdWords advertising and, when I do, I haven’t used the AdWords variables that are available.

Now that I’ve explored the topic some, I’m very excited about the idea of usine URL variables, with AdWords and in other places as well.

To show you how URL variables work, we’ll use AdWords as our example.

As you may or may not know, AdWords allows you to pass a lot of information to your landing page by using URL variables. This is what a link with variables looks like:

example.com?campaign=widgets&Network={ifContent:Content} {ifSearch:Search}&kw={keyword}

In this case, the variables ‘campaign‘ ‘Network‘ and ‘kw‘ are embedded in the URL. The ones with {} around them are dynamic variables that AdWords inserts on the fly to show which network and which keyword the click is coming from. One of the variables is ‘hard coded’ into the URL.

When a visitor clicks on the adwords ad link, the variables are populated with real data and the data is ‘appended’ to the URL of the landing page. This is an easy way for one web site to hand information to another web site.

The word ‘widget’ will be sent, if the click happened on the content network, the word ‘Content’ will be send, if the click happened on the search network, the word ‘Search’ will be sent, and finally, the keyword that the visitor used in their search will be sent.

Here’s what the final URL might look like after the data is populated:

example.com?campaign=widgets&Network=Content&kw=blue-widgets

Everything after the “?” in our example link is a variable.

So, if the URL of your landing pages is ‘example.com,’ the example above is the link you would use with your AdWords account if you wanted to pass all of those variables to the landing page (so that a script can pick up the data and use it).

But what if you want to use a VisiOlo tracking link AND pass all of those variables along to your landing page?

All you need to do is format your variables in a certain way, and VisiOlo will pass them along to the destination URL.

So, if this is your link:

VisiOlo.com/t/999

You would add the variables to your link like this:

VisiOlo.com/t/9999/campaign=widgets/Network= {ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}/kw={keyword}

As you can see, we use a “/” symbol in place of an ‘&‘ symbol for separating each variable. This format is important for supporting future features of VisiOlo.

The destination URL will use the standard syntax and will end up looking like this:

example.com?campaign=widgets&Network=Content&kw=blue-widgets

Confused yet?

Let me just go through the steps with you:

1) Create VisiOlo Link (tutorial)

• Log in to Command Central
• Go to Links->Add/Edits Link
• Name Your New Link
• Select a System
• Paste your destination URL into the correct field (In our example it is ‘example.com’)
• Save
• Find your new link in the list of links and copy it

2) Add Variables to VisiOlo Link

• In a text editor, paste your new VisiOlo Link into a new document (In our example, http://VisiOlo.com/t/9999/)
• Add the variables you want to the end of the link, separated by the “/” symbol (/campaign=widgets/Network= {ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}/kw={keyword})

3) Now use your VisiOlo tracking link in your AdWords campaign and all of the variable data will get passed to the Destination URL for you to use as you see fit.

In the near future, we will begin using URL variables to give you more detail in the Links module, but for now, at least VisiOlo tracking links won’t stand in the way of you using variables on your site.

There are ton’s of applications for this feature, and I’m excited to explore them with you.