Link Tracking for Internet Marketers
URL shortening services like bit.ly and ow.ly have grown massively in size over the past few years. The success of these url shortening services has mainly been due to social networking sites like Twitter, which limit the amount of characters you can use per post. By having a short url, you don’t have to waste characters on a long url stream.
While this may seem like a great solution for the majority of people using Twitter and just tweeting links for fun, it’s not the greatest solution out there for internet marketers. If you setup a link with an outside url shortning service, you likely won’t receive any detailed stats or be able to edit or change the page where your URL is redirecting.
Looking for a better solution? You may want to try a link management service called LinkShiftr, which is a URL shortener, but also built for marketers and those interested in monetization and full stats tracking.
Link Management with Benefits
The purpose of most url shortening sites, is that they simply redirect traffic and provide you with a short url. LinkShiftr does that and a whole lot more. Track all of your marketing campaigns, active links and shorten urls, all from within the same dashboard area.
Are you a big fan of split testing? Sure, who isn’t! Split testing is made easy with LinkShift, as you can create one url, then rotate all incoming traffic to multiple destinations. You also have the option to change weights, destination and continually add/remove destinations to further monetize your campaigns.
Other features on the LinkShiftr platform include conversion tracking, subid recording, affiliate link cloaking, branded domain pages and more.
Creating a New Link Using LinkShiftr
Using the very simple to understand LinkShiftr platform, it’s very easy to create new urls and be up and running with a new ad campaign.
Don’t be fooled by the simple layout, the platform has some amazing power behind it and is extremely easy to learn. Fill in your desired information to create a new link, then you’ll be sent to another page to fill in your destination url and options. From here you can also change the url, tag, weight, conversion value and monitor incoming traffic.
In the example above, I created a url https://lin.sh/moneybook, which redirects visitors to three prominent books on making money online. If I wanted to add/remove another book to that rotation, I can easily add it to this same shortened URL.
Track Conversions and Analyze Stats
Since LinkShiftr was designed with Internet marketers in mind, it makes sense that some of the features are geared very much toward this kind of audience.
As you can see from the screenshot above, you have a lot of detailed stats for each url campaign you create. Everything from destinations, referring domains, geotargeting, and subid, to inserting conversion tracking pixels, including unsecure pixels, secure pixels, and 3rd party pixels. Adding these to your conversion page will allow you to see which landing pages are being the most effective.
Link Tracking Monthly Price and Affiliate Program
The monthly price for using LinkShiftr is $15 a month, but you can signup at their site for a free 2 week trial. LinkTrackr also offers and affiliate program, which allows you to earn a $10 commission for each successful referral.
– Sign up for your free 14 day trial.
Wait... before you leave, consider these top resources:
Prosper202 ftw. Better, faster, reliable, and free.
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I prefer to use free Pretty Link for WordPress.
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I begin to love on this little blue “CO” button on my firefox. I believe it’s a useful tool to advance the Internet comment quality, especially for the comment poster who share their comment on their own blog. A little comment on it, a more widely blog URL supported ability would make it a better one. Comments even on blogger sometimes may not support while the blogger set the comment to be post on a new opening window. How about make an incompatible blog site submit page on coComment? And as I know, the system only collect the comments from coComment members up to NOW. That means more widely serve capability is urgent for their beta server. Well, after all, it’s absolute an amazing web2.0 service and pray for its being more and more successful.
Alex J
CEO & Founder
https://www.clickforliving.com
URL shortening services is really good for everyone and with good service and Track Conversions and Analyze Stats. It will rock. Thanks
I assume that it's all hosted? Do you know of any similar software that is self hosted?
linkshiftr looks like a good tool, we can track our campaigns so its a big bonus
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I think if you really want to have a page rank for your site on all search engines you must have this product. I never thought that shortening a url can help.
Sounds like a good service not big on the big ugly looking affiliate links they under perform as well. If you do a lot of internet marketing this would definitely look like something to look into i'll check it out.
i use free Pretty Link for WordPress.
but this sounds good. thanks.
This is great man. I like how you brought a marketing side to something as simple as URL shortening services. There’s always something to keep in mind, even at the smallest of levels.
Thanks for the heads up on the link shortener and tracking. I might try and work with it soon when I am more serious and getting stuck into work.
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I agree that link tracking is very important in internet marketing. It's all about maximizing profits and ROI, which we should all strive to do. Thanks for the post man!
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I think a lot of people, especially marketers, are missing a major issue here… when you use a hosted solution you no longer own your url and that can have financial consequences, especially if it's an affiliate url.
With the recent unrest in Libya many marketers were starting to be concerned about what would happen if the ow.ly for some reason because unresolvable or just stopped working. How many paying affiliate links do you have littered around the web that you would instantly lose if your hosted url shortner service suddenly vanished.
For some this may seem unlikely and the reality is that it is not too likely, but it can and will happen for some of the services and when it does how many people will start losing some serious income overnight?
If you think it won't ever happen then that's a pretty big risk you're taking with your company and one that I for one am not willing to take, especially when the solution is so simple.
Go get your own short url domain name and put a simple wordpress blog on it with Pretty Links plugin. If you want better tracking, stats and control then put prosper202 on your short domain name.
Just my 2 cents 😉
cheers,
Todd Ariss
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