I was just researching some places that offer toddler gymnastics in the Washington, DC area for my daughter and found Kidville. It looks to be exactly what I was looking for.
But I noticed the site had a strange url: kidville.reachlocal.com - I had clicked on a Google Adwords advertisement. Huh? It reminded me of what about.com does sometimes - puts an extra frame in my browser. Why was reachlocal doing this?
I did a little research and found that they are a marketing company. The reviews I read were quite positive so it seems that they aren't doing anything fishy to the kidville.com domain. But to avoid any confusion, I wonder why they didn't request that kidville.com setup a sub-domain and point it towards the reachlocal servers? Something like www.local.kidville.com seems more appropriate to me than kidville.reachlocal.com.
What do you think?
But I noticed the site had a strange url: kidville.reachlocal.com - I had clicked on a Google Adwords advertisement. Huh? It reminded me of what about.com does sometimes - puts an extra frame in my browser. Why was reachlocal doing this?
I did a little research and found that they are a marketing company. The reviews I read were quite positive so it seems that they aren't doing anything fishy to the kidville.com domain. But to avoid any confusion, I wonder why they didn't request that kidville.com setup a sub-domain and point it towards the reachlocal servers? Something like www.local.kidville.com seems more appropriate to me than kidville.reachlocal.com.
What do you think?
This is now "common practice" among many marketing companies targeting the SME market. Reason? For starters, local business websites are rarely built for conversions. Tracking is another big reason. Reverse proxy allows for full lead tracking without having to into the source-sites analitics, code, etc. It also allows for phonecall tracking.
It's not anything new - ReachLocal has been out there for more than five years. Many others practice simular techniques, like Yellowbook, Yodle, Idearc, etc.
Thanks,
http://www.LocalSearchSource.com
What you are seeing is a tracking URL that is part of ReachLocal's technology called Reverse Proxy. You can go here where it is explained. http://local.reachlocal.com/technology#reverse-proxy
Reverse Proxy allows the company to track campaign activity from an ad without needing to redesign a page or creating sub-domains, etc...
Thanks LocalSearchSource and Dave for the explanations, I'm quite familiar with reverse proxies - in fact I use Varnish as a reverse proxy cache to improve out web server performance. A reverse proxy is a fairly simple thing to setup and there are numerous advantages to using one depending on the goals.
I still think its a confusing way to setup the domain, but for some companies I guess it makes sense.