Tracking URL Clicks with URL Shorteners
In this lesson I wanted to talk to you guys about tracking. In a future module I am putting together we are going to really dive into analytics and see where fans are coming from, what they are doing and how they are spending money and spreading buzz about your music. Today however, we are going to look at tracking links via URL shorteners.
If you are using Twitter, at some point in time you have probably seen a link that looks like this:
- http://tinyurl.com/fnwwjde
- http://bit.ly/3ToMCw
- http://su.pr/1Jz11s
or some other version of a crazy looking link. These links have been made by a URL shortening service, or a service that makes URL’s that may look like this:
http://www.genyrockstars.com/2009/07/why-your-music-matters.html
into this:
http://su.pr/2NjWzC
On Twitter this makes a lot of sense. Taking a URL that is 50-60-70 characters long and shrinking it to 25 or so gives you more room to add content rather than taking up space with the link. While this is extremely beneficial, there is a hidden benefit to using some of these services. The tracking.
Why would you want to track your links?
So you can see if people like your content! If you post a link on Facebook, wouldn’t you like to know how many people clicked it? What if you linked to your local newspaper website that posted a review of your concert? By adding tracking to that link you can see how many people you were responsible for sending their way. This gives you leverage and also shows you what your fans liked and what they didn’t care for. It also shows at what times of the day your links are more likely to get clicked than others.
From that newspaper article example above:
If you posted a link on your Facebook Fan Page telling your fans to check it out, knowing how many people clicked on that link gives you a clear picture if that reporter is going to come calling back. If you had 20 people click out of 10,000 Facebook fans, there is a good shot your press from that paper is going to stop. If you can prove that 1,500 people clicked in a matter of minutes you can turn around and ask for more coverage as newspaper make their money from page views and you just sent a bunch over. Using these shortening services you can show those clicks.
We are going to go over the 2 services that utilize click tracking and a very easy to use system of creating the short links and checking stats.
SU.PR
SU.PR is a product of popular social media site, StumbleUpon. You can log into Su.pr with your StumbleUpon account and get instant access to stats and URL shortening. The next major step is to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts for easy cross posting. You do this in the settings tab in the top right corner.
When on the main page within Su.pr, your options are small which makes it super easy (pun intended) to get what you need.
First you can enter your long URL into the box and click “Just Shorten.” This will take your long URL and make it into one that looks like http://su.pr/example. From there you can use that link anywhere, from Facebook pages to YouTube video descriptions to Myspace pages to Twitter posts. Anytime that someone clicks on that link, Su.pr will keep track of it for you and it will look something like this:
You can see that one of their posts had 27 clicks, another only 1 and the last had 12. Clicking on the view stats button you can see a detailed and drilled down version of your stats including the days and times when the link was clicked. View the image below:
This was a great post that ended up getting clicked on 498 times and received an additional 13k+ visitors from natural StumbleUpon traffic, an added bonus to using Su.pr. When people get to the link and have a StumbleUpon toolbar, they can thumbs up or thumbs down your page and you can receive additional organic traffic to your site.
The other thing you can do direct from Su.pr is post a short message directly to your Twitter or Facebook page (or both). In this instance you would type your message, insert the link and check off where you want the message to go. In the below example you will see that I have said:
New post – Why all musicians daydream – http://www.genyrockstars.com/2009/08/why-all-indie-musicians-day-dream.html
and I want that message to go to both Facebook and Twitter.
As soon as I click post, it goes live onto both Twitter and Facebook and the stats start adding up.
Bit.ly
The second service that we use to track clicks is Bit.ly. It is very similar to Su.pr, just without the ties to StumbleUpon traffic and Facebook. The first thing you do with Bit.ly is grab a URL you want to shorten and click shorten. It will give you a link that looks like http://bit.ly/example.
From here you can use that link anywhere that you want to post a link and track. The tracking is where I feel Bit.ly is superior to Su.pr.
Under the main bar you can see all the links you have ever shortened with Bit.ly and their performance.
By clicking on the info+ button you can drill down and see how your links are doing.
The first thing you see is general info on the link. You can see we gathered 525 clicks from a Bit.ly short URL we posted to Twitter, the link location, where the clicks came from and some conversations that took place aroud the link.
From here you have the breakdown of traffic with tabs to toggle from
- click
- referrers
- locations
as well as timeframe
- now
- past week
- past month
- total
The last portion is the conversations. This is cool to see who Tweeted or used the link in FriendFeed, which gives you an idea of how viral the link was. Here you can see 2 Tweets that has this link. We received some good conversions for only 2 tweets (500+ clicks).
Conclusion
No matter which service you use, the point is to keep track of your links to see what your fans like, what they click on and how you can get more fans clicking. Once you start to see what they like you can optimize your content to match and start getting them into your sales funnel.
If you have questions on URL tracking, please leave them in the comments or in the forums and we will be happy to help you out!
-Greg
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