Using url shortner to track traffic

[danijel99]

Hi everyone

As you may already know url shortners are nice and easy way to track how much traffic is coming to your web page from specific location(s).

If you don't know about url shortners this is what is all about - If your web address is www.yoursite.com you can go to some url shorting service and put your web addres there and it will give you link like bit.ly/wetwf

Than you post your links online (facebook, twitter forums, blog comments...) and on url shortner site you can see how much clicks you get over your shorten link. This is how you can see what traffic sources work best.

Here are some popular url shorting services:

bitly.com - very nice and easy

su.pr - service from Stumble Upon(they say that it can increase traffic)

goo.gl - this is Google's service

awe.sm - This one is not free. It is 30 days trial and than $15/month. I didn't try it but they say it can track conversions also

What services do you use and what are your experiences?

 

[djbaxter]

I don't use any and I wouldn't advise their use at all personally. With so many malware infected drive-by trojan dropper sites these days, I think most people want to see where a link is taking them before they click on it.

 

[danijel99]

Thanks. I wonder have there been some split testing on that.

I use them and I sometimes I get ok results sometimes not. So they can be useful...

Do you know some other method to track traffic from specific location?

 

[djbaxter]

Do you know some other method to track traffic from specific location?

Google Analytics?

 

[chrisba]

Personally I just like to use my own domains for this..

 

[danijel99]

When I said from specific location I meant specific location on web not geographically.

So I meant from some specific web page like some comment on blog or facebook, not USA or Canada.

Than you can compare and see where do you get more traffic from.

Maybe I didn't express my self right. Sorry for that

 

[Myron92]

You can do a url shorter in your control panel of your hosting

Also look into pretty link, its a word press plugin you can track you links with that and it allows you the shorten the links

You can also use a sub id from whatever network you are using to track your links

Google analytics allows you to track where your traffic is coming from, go to referrer section and it will they you want sites it came from

Hope this help