Leevi Graham — Wednesday 17th September, 9:22pm

Using URL rewrites to make ExpressionEngine, Campaign Monitor & Google Analytics play nice

After our appearance at the Rapid Solutions conference, we got to work chasing up the leads that were generated through our booth and presentation. The first phase of this process was to send all the attendees a nice follow up email thanking them for their support and dropping by the booth.

Campaign Monitor + Google Analytics

We always use CampaignMonitor.com and Google Analytics to send and track our email campaigns. They are a reliable and powerful combination providing detailed reports on opening rates, bounce rates and user tracking. I’m not going to go into how to set up Google Analytics in Campaign Monitor, you can find out more about the process here.

To track the users behaviour and communicate with Google, Campaign Monitor automatically adds the necessary query string to outgoing links in your email. Using the following outgoing link as an example:

http://www.abcwidgets.com/email

Campaign Monitor will add the Google tracking code, modifying the link. The new outgoing link will look similar to:

http://abcwidgets.cmail1.com/l/12345/l/www.abcwidgets.com/email?utm_medium=email&↩
utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&utm_content=[email]&utm_campaign=Newcastle+Web+Design+↩
Development+Campaign&utm_term=visit+out+site

When a user clicks on the outgoing link they will be sent to the Campaign Monitor server where the click is recorded and the user is redirected to:

http://www.abcwidgets.com/email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&↩
utm_content=[email]&utm_campaign=Newcastle+Web+Design+Development+Campaign&↩
utm_term=visit+out+site

This is pretty standard stuff and generally won’t affect how most websites operate. However we recently experienced a couple of issues when using the Google tracking code, ExpressionEngine and the remove index.php URL rewrite technique.

Rewriting ExpressionEngine URLs using .htaccess

Using the standard “include method” remove index.php rewrite rule:

# Remove index.php
# Uses the "include method"
# http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Remove_index.php_From_URLs/#Include_List_Method
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5})$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(member|siteP[0-9]{2,8}) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

the example URL will be rewritten to:

http://www.abcwidgets.com/index.php?/email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&↩
utm_content=[email]&utm_campaign=Newcastle+Web+Design+Development+Campaign&↩
utm_term=visit+out+site

ExpressionEngine will render the index template in the email template group with the following query string parameters:

utm_campaign	Newcastle+Web+Design+Development+Campaign
utm_content	[email]
utm_medium	email
utm_source	Campaign+Monitor
utm_term	visit+out+site

Perfect… That’s exactly what is expected, despite the double “?” in the URL (we’ll fix that later).

The site index 404 problem

The problem arrises when the link directs the user to the homepage URL without a template group and template. In this case Campaign Monitor will produce the following URL:

http://www.abcwidgets.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&↩
utm_content=[email]&utm_campaign=Newcastle+Web+Design+Development+Campaign&↩
utm_term=visit+out+site

ExpressionEngine will try and render the utm_medium=email&utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&utm_content=[email]&utm_campaign=Newcastle+Web+Design+Development+Campaign&utm_term=visit+out+site as the template group name which obviously doesn’t exist and the user will be presented with a 404 error.

At this stage I should also note that Campaign Monitor and ExpressionEngine is not doing anything wrong here.

The solution

To avoid the remove index.php rule rewriting the url and rendering a non-existent template we are going to hijack the request and render the index template.

To do this we first test if the request query string starts with utm_medium using:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^utm_medium

Then check if there is nothing in the request uri:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]

Finally if the two conditions are met, the url is rewritten using the correct template and template group with the query string appended to the end of the URL. In the example below site is the template group and index is the template. The [L] flag tells apache to stop processing the .htaccess rules.

RewriteRule (.*) /index.php?/site/index/&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

The full .htaccess rewrite rule that first handles the homepage rewrite and then URLs with template groups and templates is:

# rewrite homepage urls that have the google query string
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^utm_medium
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /index.php?/site/index/&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

# Remove index.php
# Uses the "include method"
# http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Remove_index.php_From_URLs/#Include_List_Method
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5})$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(member|siteP[0-9]{2,8}) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [L]

One final touch

One final touch is to make sure any Google tracking code is properly attached to urls that have existing templates and template groups. A slight modification to the last line of the remove index.php rule provides the fix. We’ll simply use an ‘&’ character to join the existing template group/template query with the Google tracking code. After the modification the new line is:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

Using the example url earlier in this post, our modified rewrite will produce:

http://www.abcwidgets.com/index.php?/email&utm_medium=email&↩
utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&utm_content=[email]&↩
utm_campaign=Newcastle+Web+Design+Development+Campaign&utm_term=visit+out+site

The final .htaccess rules

The final .htaccess rules, including turning on the rewrite engine and settings the rewrite base looks like:

# Turn the rewrite engine on
RewriteEngine On

# Set the rewrite base
RewriteBase /

# Rewrite homepage urls that have the google query string
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^utm_medium
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /index.php?/site/index/&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

# Remove index.php
# Uses the "include method"
# http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Remove_index.php_From_URLs/#Include_List_Method
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5})$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(member|siteP[0-9]{2,8}) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /index.php?/site/index/&%{QUERY_STRING}

The conclusion

So there you have it — how to combine Campaign Monitor’s Google tracking code and ExpressionEngine URL rewriting.

Caveats

This solution works on our setup but it may not work on yours. Post a comment if you have any trouble applying the code above and I’ll try and help out.

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