how to track who’s clicking your links

get the most out of those urls.

by becky livingston
the accountant’s social media handbook

you may want to track urls by posting location.

more on social media: determine your target audience | what is social media? | how social media works with accountants’ top 5 marketing goals

for example, you have a tax blog story you want to share on facebook, linkedin and googleplus, but you want to know which platform generates more traffic to the website. you would need to add a url tracking token to the urls that identified the referral source – often called url builders.

tools like burlybuilder.com, google’s url builder, e-nor.com and piwik.org create long urls with tracking code in them. in this example, google’s url builder was used.

activity

complete the fields as described. the campaign medium is the place you are sharing the content, such as facebook, linkedin or twitter, etc. campaign term and name may be the same, and should include a keyword about the content, such as “tax-tips.”

now that you have a really long url, you will need to shorten it for use in the social media platforms, especially twitter, or it will look awkward to have a 250-character link floating behind the content post.

to shorten a url, consider using tools like hootsuite, bitly, google’s url shortener, bit.do and tinyurl.com. by shortening longer links with these tools, you can create a record for the url that may be tracked through your preferred scheduling tool.

posted on may 18, 2016