Use Google URL Builder and TinyURL to create useful, user friendly links
Spurred on by an article called Google Analytics Tagging Demystified by Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive, I decided to start tagging links to help track the relative success of my promotional activities. I ran into a problem almost straight away though!
The value of adding tags to a link (for meta information such as which marketing campaign it was part of) is indisputable. As Lurie puts it:
Tags are your most powerful, flexible analytics tool. With them, your analytics software delivers statistics on every ad buy, keyword, ad version and campaign. Without them, your analytics software is stuck in 1996.
Google URL Builder provides an easy form to construct the URL for you.
The issue I had was peculiar to my situation. One approach I’ve used to create awareness and traffic for my simpleContact application has been to list it on script directories such as Hot Scripts. This has worked very well, but when I entered a suitably tagged URL it exceeded the maximum length allowed by the site.
Enter TinyURL. Popular among Twitter users, TinyURL does what it says on the tin. It takes a long URL and generates a (very) short redirect link. Problem solved.
I look forward to using tagging more extensively – it is clearly a killer feature.
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April 12th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Hi Alex.. I foresaw the same problem, albeit when putting this “long” tagged url in an email campaign. Do you think putting a tiny url will be acceptable to recepients in this case? I cannot risk html coding because you have many people who use plain text to view emails.
April 12th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
You might want to try Sidepath. It’s a self-hosted app that can create redirects on your website. So for example, you may put a nice abbreviated url in your email, then use Sidepath to bounce users to your tagged URL.
Sidepath has recently been made freeware, although you can choose to pay its previous selling price of $10.75 to qualify for support.