Category Archives: Cool

How To Track Social Media

From a marketing perspective, social media is becoming really hard to ignore. It’s everywhere – from storing your resume on LinkedIn to keeping up with friends on Facebook and Google+, to sharing updates, video and pictures on sites like YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

All of these are great but there’s so many that it’s difficult to keep up with all of them. How are you supposed to know where your best results are coming from?

That’s why we built Linktrack. We give you a simple tool to monitor and measure results in real time across a wide variety of sites. You can quickly see where your traffic is coming from so you can better tailor your marketing.


Try it now with these steps:

  1. Sign up for an account here
  2. Make a tracking link to measure what you’re interested in (bringing visitors to your web site for example).
  3. Post it on your Facebook page, Google+ page, in your Twitter stream, in your YouTube descriptions, etc.
  4. Watch the traffic come in over a few hours or days and you’ll start to get a feel for which sites are doing the most for you!

Want to take it a step further? Try out a month of one of our premium accounts for only $1 and try one of these options:

$1 Upgrade Trial

We’ve been running the Linktrack.info web site for years and years and we’ve never offered a discount on our premium account upgrades. Seriously – we’re like the worst sales people in the world.

But all that ends today! Try any of our premium accounts for a whole month for just a buck. That’s $0.03 a day to try email click alerts, downloadable reports, custom domain names and more. If you don’t completely love it, cancel at any time – no questions asked.

Click here to get the $1 upgrade now

Need more info? Drop me a line and ask me anything.

Cheers,

Keeton

Manage Your Preferences

We’ve recently added a feature for managing web site preferences on the “My Account” page. The new preferences options will let you set the number of links and tracking records to display per page.

If you have a Professional account, you can also set your preferred domain name so you don’t have to select it manually when making a new link.

Look for the “preferences” link on the “My Account” page:

Custom Domain Names – Beta

Update 11/12/2010: This feature is no longer in beta and is now available to all Professional account holders.

Read more: custom domain tracking.


We’re currently beta testing a new feature for custom domain names. If you would like to use your own custom domain name with our tracking service and are interested in the beta program, please let us know.

The final custom domain feature will be available under a new pricing option above the Professional account.

Domains brought on during beta testing will be grandfathered in with no additional cost.


Requirements:

  • You must have a Professional level account to participate in the beta program
  • You will need to register and configure your own domain name
  • Your domain can’t be in use for any other purpose. If you already have web site, you will need to make a subdomain (like subdomain.mydomain.com)
  • Your profile must have a valid contact email (in case we need to contact you about your domain).

Checklist:

  1. Let us know what domain you want to use
  2. Configure your domain’s DNS so that the CNAME record or a forwarder points to our server’s alternate domain hostname: alt.linktrack.info
  3. Tell us your account name, and notify us when the DNS is configured

Some Notes:

  • This program is being beta tested. We expect to make changes to it based on customer feedback
  • DNS configuration changes can sometimes take 24-72 hours to take effect

New Account System. Aw yeah.

Flickr photo by jurvetsonIf your’e a regular LinkTrack user you probably noticed that we installed a new account system over the weekend.  This came mostly from the billion or so requests we received to make our link creation/link tracking system more user friendly and easier to organize.  There were also a few requests from the owners that we also do something to cover the expenses we’re racking up.

The solution was simple – we instituted a user account system where you can make links, track them, and keep them organized under an account name.  Same as always, but this way the links are tied to an account so you have more control over them and can make changes if you want.

681788864_9ac6917fa5We also added a few ‘premium’ features and gave people the option to upgrade their accounts.  Premium features are things like password protection on your  links, email alerts, set your links to expire at a certain time or not at all, turn them on and off, download account data, etc.

Lastly, we re-organized some of the data to make things easier to read, added some flashy graphs and tried to improve the look and feel without making it too cumbersome.

The result is something that we’re pretty proud of.  We’ve got a nice free system for people to use with some features that aren’t offered anywhere else and our users are already taking advantage of the paid service.  I asked a few of them and got a 50/50 mix of those who just want to support the service, and those who want to use the features which I think is awesome.

Please feel free to check out the new site.  If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please drop us a line anytime.

Image Tracking

Let’s say you want to use LinkTrack to gauge traffic to particular web pages on your web site. Here’s what you do:

  1. Pick an image on your web site like this one: this one
  2. Make a LinkTrack link directly to that image like this: http://linktrack.info/36nq0en
  3. Use the tracking link in your image html like this:<img src="http://linktrack.info/36nq0en">and place it on your web page.

Every time your page is loaded, it will register on your tracking page! It’s no substitute for your server log files, but you can use it to track one specific web page rather than the site as a whole, or use it on sites where you wouldn’t have access to the log files.

If you were to use a smaller image like a transparent .gif or something that’s 1 pixel wide by 1 pixel tall, you would still get the tracking benefit, but the image wouldn’t even be noticeable.

Here’s my tracking picture in action:

See the tracking results at http://linktrack.info/track/36nq0en

Neat, huh?

Bulk Email Campaign Tracking

Email campaign tracking is pretty important. If you’re paying top dollar and investing your own time and effort into gathering an email list, writing good sales copy, and ensuring deliverability, then you want to get as much for your effort as possible.

If you’re just linking back to your site using regular URLs, consider using LinkTrack URLs instead. That way you can get an idea of what your readers are most interested in and how they’re reacting to your messages.

Once you know that, you can tailor your campaign better achieve your goals.

Sample Email Signature

I’ve seen people using LinkTrack in their email signatures, and it’s a pretty cool idea. Here’s a sample email signature that I use:

Full name
Company Name
999-999-9999
name@domain.com
http://mycompany.com

Note that if you click the mycompany.com link, it’s actually a LinkTrack link. That way you can get an idea of how many people are interested enough in what you do to check out your web site.

How to Shorten Long Links

The biggest use people have for LinkTrack is as a link shortening service. If you take a long link like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&
q=124+Grapevine+Hwy,+Hurst,+TX+76054
&sll=37.0625,-5.677068&sspn=49.978077,92.8125&ie=
UTF8&ll=32.871721,-97.16844&spn=0.0065
24,0.01133&z=17&layer=c&cbll=32.870212,-97.168443

You can shorten it so it looks like this:

http://linktrack.info/p00wwqj

As an added bonus, you can track how often that link has been clicked on. Each page gets its own tracking page like this one.

I used this the other day when I was meeting with a client. After I sent him directions, I was able to follow up on the tracking page to see that they had accessed them.