You may have come across one of many services that offer to shorten your URL’s. There are a variety of ways you can use URL shortening services. Some of the ways are pretty obvious, such as condensing URL’s so you can fit more characters in less space. However, there are other benefits to using short URL’s when you use advanced statistics for measuring clicks.
Bram Pitoyo recently posted a list of services that offer the shortest URL shorteners on his joint blog called Linkenfuego. The list is quite expansive, I had no idea that there were so many services. I suppose when you reconsider how many people are actually on this planet it makes sense that there are a couple dozen competing services…or more. Thanks for the research and the post Bram.
There is also this list by Mashable that list over 90 URL shortening services.
URL Shortening Services Are Not All Equal
Some services simply offer a way to shorten a link, others offer additional features that extend their service. This post is about a few URL shortening services that offer extended offerings. Some of those extended offerings include:
- Click stats, in the case of Budurl very detailed stats. Using some URL shortening services you can actually track how many people click on a link that you post on blogs, microblogs (Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Identi.ca…), forums, and other places around the internet. Before click stats were available you would have to generally assume that a spike in your traffic was due to one of perhaps a hundred posts. With click stats you can get really detailed information about links that you post…and you’re not limited to traffic that goes to your site.
- Open ID integration, such as that offered by local service Twurl.cc (which also offers click stats). OpenID is a decentralized system that allows you to sign into any service (that offers the option) with one password. It’s a great way to provide proof of your identity without releasing a lot of personal data about yourself.
- Bookmarklets as offered by a variety of services. By simply dragging a small app to your browser tool bar you can quickly get the unique and shortened URL’s to use around the web. Bookmarklet’s are micro applications that can make your life easier.
Why Measure user clicks at all?
As you work and play on the Internet in a variety of capacities you access and interact with information and people. When you leave a link directing a user to a page on the web knowing how many people click on the link is a measure of success to your efforts. When you track user clicks on the links over time you are able to determine the value of the original source of traffic.
Link traffic statistics is a measure of interest and curiosity concerning links that you post. Areas of the web that have lower click through (interest & curiosity) can be eliminated or reworked to maximize your effiency when posting around the web. Using link stats you can determine the value of the medium for posting links and the interest surrounding what you are sharing.
Doesn’t Site Analytics Already Give Me All the Data I need?
Click stats should augment other forms of analytics data. When you drive traffic to a site through a link the visit appears as direct traffic. When you use URL shortening click stats you can find gather advanced information down to the very page to determine how effective your efforts to direct traffic to a site is.
How Dependable is The Data?
If you are going to be taking the time to measure the traffic it would be nice to have good data to work with right? I set up and deployed a simple experiment to determine how accurate the click traffic was. I created and redirected a link to this page using all seven services at the same time. Starting with the initial link to this blog post I redirecting the link across several services. I basically created a chain of redirects, each service would redirect to the next, each service was supposed to log the redirect as a “click”. Here are the services that I used:
Much to my surprise the click data was inconsistent across the services. Three services had consistent stats and three other services only logged one or two clicks total, far below the dozen clicks that the link received. Now, I don’t know what happened with some of the services but a fail in a test like this indicates that some services are more dependable then others, more testing will take place in the future to verify click discrepancy.
I don’t talk about junk tools, only the tools that I determine are the best…i.e. my opinion sometimes based on facts and perhaps at times significant research (pretty subjective I’m sure). I determined that there are a variety of services that offer click stats but one service stood out from the rest in offering click stats, Budurl. So much so that I will be doing a separate blog post on the service in the future.
I also wanted to note that local Portland, OR firm Twurl.cc did great in the test too…and like I mentioned before they have open ID…yeah, big fan here.
Click Stats Have Multiple Uses
You can apply click stats in a variety of ways. You can gather information on both internal site pages and external sources of traffic. There are a variety of uses and every situation determines the strategy that you should deploy. What are some ways that you have used click stats?
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