Adding Symbols And Letters To Urls To Track Where Traffic Comes From

[silly.questions 0]

As my username suggests, silly questions.

 

We were in a meeting this week and suddenly to URLs of our homepage & and or ? and or = with letters were being added to track visitors from a third party website we are paying to be featured.

 

If I Google tracking I do not find anything. Can someone please tell me what are my colleagues doing here, what is the right term, so I can research it?

 

Many thanks for your help.

Edited November 8, 2019 by silly.questions

[Hadron 10]

Facebook will add tracking information by appending your url with tracking code so it can send feedback to you with the campaign statistics.

You can also see these results in your Google analytics as well as Facebook analytics.

 

[silly.questions 0]

Yes but what is the correct term to search for topics to learn about this so I can do it myself and see results in Google Analytics? Thanks for your help.

[Ghozer 112]

it all depends who your provider is, who is this website you are paying to track visitors?

they would usually have given your web developers some code to place in your website, to aid in the tracking..

Any "? & =" you may see in the url, are usually part of the actual web language, used to navigate a webpage, they could mean anything, think of them like indices... 

and giving you a "correct term for topics to learn about this" isn't as easy as you think as it will depend on a few factors as to which route you need to take, as there are different web coding languages, that all use and handle those indices differently and for different reasons..

such as PHP, they can be used for navigation such as site.com/forum/?page=1&topic=32  - this would obviously show page 1 of topic 32 from within the forum, but it totally depends on how each website/page is coded, as to what they are specifically used for..

if, like you suspect, it's something to do with the place you are paying to track visitors, then your best and most accurate answer will come from them.