Making links the hard way

OK, so you’ve got a tweet ready to post. It’s short and snappy, with a link to your website. And you’re really hoping it’ll generate some conversions. Heck you’re even thinking of promoting it.

But how do you plan to:

  1. Maximize its clickability?
  2. Measure the value of the web traffic it generates?

There are services out there to help you, and here we cover a couple of the biggest and best.

Bitly

If you sign up at bitly.com for an account, you’ll be able to measure the number of clicks each Bitly link achieves. For example, we made shortlink http://bit.ly/linkstats which counts click-thrus to our website. It’s better than nothing, but not particularly useful:

bitly-dash

Goo.gl

Head over to goo.gl and you’ll find a similar free service from Google to create a handy short link from a l-o-n-g URL (like the one you’re about to make). It also offers handy summary reports, but again, they’re not going to set your marketing on fire.

OK, so now we have a way to measure clicks. But how can we make your links better?

 

Analytics!

  1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account at http://www.google.com/analytics
  2. Install the Google Analytics web tracking code on your website
  3. Use this page to create a link with campaign parameters: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
  4. Copy the long link, then go create a short link with Bitly or Goo.gl – whichever you like best.

Now, when someone clicks the Bitly short link, they’ll provide your Google Analytics with details about:

  • The campaign source (e.g. “twitter”)
  • The campaign medium (e.g. “organic_tweet” or “promoted_tweet”)
  • The campaign name (e.g. “2015_09_20” – log it in your spreadsheet!)
  • The content (e.g. “tweet1” – again log details in your spreadsheet!)

Yes, you’re going to need  a spreadsheet to keep track of what “tweet1” means, and which campaign you started on September 20. But at least now you’ve connected all the dots.

Finally you can sit back and relax, and wait for Google Analytics to provide you with valuable reports about traffic from your campaigns. Except, oops, there are no “goals” defined yet. That’s coming in the next blog post…

There should be an easier way, right?

In a word, yes. And that’s exactly what motivates us here at LinkStats.net.

If you’re interested in a simple, elegant and powerful way to create better links that deliver meaningful marketing stats, then follow @link_stats on Twitter now. Let’s make links better, together.

Kevin Hutchinson, Founder