The Best Ways to Track Your Links
The Best Ways to Track Your Links
Important Notice: Our web hosting provider recently started charging us for additional visits, which was unexpected. In response, we're seeking donations. Depending on the situation, we may explore different monetization options for our Community and Expert Contributors. It's crucial to provide more returns for their expertise and offer more Expert Validated Answers or AI Validated Answers. Learn more about our hosting issue here.
The Best Ways to Track Your Links
If you use social media in order to get any type of results, chances are you are big on tracking your content. From social media dashboards to tracking scripts, here are the best ways to track your links and your content.
Google Analytics
If you run a blog or website, you are familiar with Google Analytics. It tracks your visitors, traffic, content, and beyond giving you detailed stats like visitor city and from where your traffic came. Here’s the rub: if you want to use Google Analytics, you have to own the website or blog where the links are being directed. If you do not, then there is no way for you to place the script on the pages. You can install the script on your website (if you have a blogger then it makes it extremely easy) by following the instructions that Google Analytics provides.
If you want to build your own script for tailored campaigns, you can do that as well. It helps filter your traffic source. Use the Google URL Builder as an easy way to create a custom script that will make tracking your links via email campaigns or social media campaigns easier.
Bit.ly
Bit.ly is one of the most popular link tracking devices. I tend to use bit.ly on my blog even though I still use Google Analytics just because it is an easy way to track where your clicks are coming from and how viral your links are.
In addition, bit.ly now offers a "bitmark" bookmarklet which makes saving, shortening and sharing your links incredibly easy. It’s a very popular tool which is also very efficient in tracking your tweets. Aside from having to log in to your bit.ly account to view the stats, there really aren’t many complaints. Plus it makes shortening links and sharing them with a group project very easy.
Social Media Dashboards
Popular dashboards like HootSuite and TweetDeck are very efficient in tracking your content. While their analytics tools are quite limited, they are still efficient for basic social media campaigns. This is ideal for people who have to multi-task many social media campaign because the dashboard design is very easy for you to view multiple campaigns at once and filter out different results.
You can even mix all three of these suggestions. Each serves a different purpose, and for example, if the metrics on the social media dashboard does not meet your needs, you can just use bit.ly to get more in depth information.