Click tracking is leaner, meaner and cleaner

People are more likely to click a short link than a longer one. It looks more businesslike and professional to share shortened links on social media, and it will help you track where your clicks are coming from. Click tracking is something that I recommend using when split-testing (A/B-testing) posts and Facebook Ads to see where your audience comes from and which link gets more clicks. Then you can easily see which campaign works best and you might even save time and money by analyzing your data. Maybe it´s the one with the source from the email campaign that works best? Or is it the campaign from your newsletter, Twitter account, Pinterest or Facebook? Click tracking will help you to optimize your posts and ads. With click tracking you get to know your audience better and knowing how and where to reach them next time. Click tracking will help you to get a detailed overview of your collected audience data. Nothing is better than saving time and money, right? Read more about split-testing here on our blog.

What does click-tracking mean and how does it work?

There are some different ways you can go on about this. Launch Digital Marketing writes about UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes: “A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name”. This will help Google Analytics to tell where your audience came from as well as what campaign directed them to you.

UTM is kind of the same as parameters, and in 24SevenSocial we uses Parameters. Google is a good help when they explain using parameters like this: “By adding campaign parameters to your URLs, you can identify the campaigns that send traffic to your site. When a user clicks a referral link, these parameters are sent to Google Analytics, so you can see the effectiveness of each campaign in your reports. For example, you could use campaign parameters to find out if more users arrive at your download page in an app marketplace from an in-app ad or a search ad”.

Campaign Kickstarter

In 24SevenSocial´s platform you can add parameters to your URLs manually to keep better track of the links you share. With parameters you can use to create different campaigns to track where the traction is coming from. One example: I can write CampaignKickstarter=Source&Twitter and only use this link on Twitter, and I can change “Twitter” with “Facebook” at the end. Afterwards, I only use that other link for a different campaign for Facebook. Then I can see where I get more traction with the same content but on different platforms.

I tried this with our blogpost on How to get funded with Kickstarter by using Facebook, and I could instantly see that the clicks where coming more from Twitter than Facebook. Which is really interesting since I´ve heard Twitter was dying, but it really isn´t. With this kind of tracking I view Twitter with whole new eyes now.

There are several parameters you can add to your URLs. Make sure that each parameters have the value and the “goal” to get the data you want. You can also add parameters according to which medium, content, term and campaign you´re launching. Because then it´s easier to keep your data in order for yourself. One example is if you want to track your newsletter in July, you can use CampaignNewsletter=SourceNewsletter&July and then you will be able to track the link you send out in the newsletter.

The most important thing you can do is to continuously test and measure every link with every post to what works the best. Find out what triggers your audience. You can always read more about how to do the best tests here on our blog.

Resumé

Remember to keep your links mean, lean, clean and add parameters that helps you to get detailed data on your content and audience. Let me know how click tracking works for you, and maybe Twitter will surprise you like it did with me? Comment below!