subject: How To Track Links Using Google Analytics [print this page] How To Track Links Using Google Analytics
It is a common practice for social marketers to use URL shorteners to track how many people clicked on a particular article. By tracking clicks on links, marketers hope to gather intelligence that will help them optimize content and distribution elements. But, tracking clicks has two major flaws.
Clicks Don't Equal Visits
The first flaw related to tracking clicks is that the number of clicks reported does not equal the number of viewers. In our own study using various URL shortening services (even our own), we could not reconcile the number of clicks to actual visits to our site. For example, we wrote Article A and created a short link for it. Then we published Article A on twitter. Our shortening service showed 15 clicks instantaneously, and then the clicks continued to climb. By days end, for example, Article A got 99 clicks. Now, we expect to see 99 visits to our website, right? Well, not so fast, when we explored Google Analytics the next day, we could not find 99 visits nor could we reconcile 99 clicks to visits on our site from any other traffic source. We could not successfully reconcile clicks to visits from any URL shortening service. So the first flaw related to tracking clicks is that the number of clicks recorded does not equal the number of readers/viewers/visits.
Clicks Lack Further Insight
The second flaw related to tracking clicks is that clicks don't provide insight about how a viewer behavior. For example, if viewers click on the link and read Article A, did they stay on the site and read another article, or go to another page on the site? Are they a new visitor or a returning visitor?
Conclusion
In conclusion, using Google Analytics to track links is a much more accurate and insightful way to evaluate the effectiveness of your articles. The only service we know of that will allow link tracking at the article level is http://Unly.it. Unly.it assigns a unique tracking key to each link and that key can be found in Google Analytics under referring sources/referral path where you can find metrics for each articles.
For more information about this please click here: How To Track Links Using Google Analytics
