Category Archives: Uses

getLinks API Function

A customer contacted me the other day and asked if he could plug in to the API to pull certain links out of his account and sort them by the number of clicks they had received.

He wanted to publish the links and their totals on a web page. He went on to explain that he’s running a contest and would like the entrants to be able to check on their stats and compare them with other contestants to see who’s collecting the most links.

There was a workaround with the existing system, but it was cludgy so I went ahead and added a search/sort/order method for multiple links to the API. This will let you pull data on multiple links, either by the link ID or by the group they’re in. You can sort and order them as needed.

You can find details on your API credentials page at https://linktrack.info/api/getCredentials. There’s a real-world opens source code sample here.

This method can also return data in either XML (our soon-to-be-replaced-default) or JSON. We’ve expanded the API system to output both formats and will continue with that as a standard going forward. More on that in another post.

Feature: Conversion Tracking

ROI, or Return On Investment is a critical metric for success in online marketing. It’s important to know where your clicks are coming from, but it’s even better to know which ones are turning into sales.

Measuring ROI with Linktrack is simple thanks to our Conversion Tracking feature. If you have a Professional account, just click the “Track Conversions” check box when you make or edit a link. Once it’s turned on, you can download a snippet of HTML code that can be placed on any successful sale or conversion page.

When a click turns into a conversion, it’s recorded in our system!

At Linktrack, we use our own Conversion Tracking feature to measure the success of our advertising campaigns. Here’s an example from our latest Google AdWords ad:

Use conversion tracking to measure ROI from:

  • Pay-Per-Click marketing
  • Banner advertising
  • Traffic exchanges
  • Affiliate marketing
  • and more

Try it now with a Professional account and get your first month free for only $1!

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:

Banner Tracking

One of our users recently asked:

Can your site do banner referral links? How do you set up a tracking link with a banner?

We have a lot of users that use our site for banner tracking. Here are some steps and sample code to get started:

  1. Use our site to make a tracking link that points to your desired location (where the want the user to go)
  2. Copy your tracking link into the HTML code below.
  3. Replace the “img src” part with the URL of the banner image you want to use.
  4. Paste the HTML code onto your web page or email where needed.


<!--Start HTML code -->
<a href="http://linktrack.info/your_tracking_link_here">
  <img src="http://yourdomain.com/your_image_here.jpg" />
</a>
<!--End HTML code -->

Should look something like this:




Custom Domains Now Available

Last month we launched the Custom Domain Beta program and it was a huge success!

Today I’m pleased to announce that we’ve added the Custom Domain feature and made it available to all of our Professional account holders at no additional charge.

Yes – you read that last part correctly. We originally intended to charge extra for the awesome new feature, but decided to roll it into our increasingly popular Professional account.

If you don’t have a Professional account yet, you can get one here.

To add and edit custom domains (yes – you can have more than one) just look for the custom domain management panel on your “My Account” page:

Where Do People Click In From?

Today’s guest poster, Jamie from Totally The Bomb uses linktrack daily, so we asked her to tell us why she’s chosen us as her link tracking service.


Thanks Linktrack! I’m happy to be here. Let me just start by saying that without linktrack, I wouldn’t have a clue that social networking even actually worked for me.

For example, I hosted a give away on my blog today. I made four links going to the same place, but I uploaded them in different places. I put one on my twitter feed, one on my facebook, one on contest websites, and one in a mass email I sent out to my subscribers.

I checked on my links right now, and I just discovered that my link on twitter got 250 clicks, the one I did on the contest website only got 16. So, what have I learned from this? Dude, don’t waste my time with that contest website anymore.

Which means that Linktrack just saved me a serious amount of time.

Now, I know that there are people out there who do this social media thing as a business. I just think it’d be really nice to show the linktrack page to your boss and say, “LOOK! That stupid contest website you have me posting to isn’t actually working! Can we try something else?”

Let’s face it, in this whole crazy technological day and age, it’s all about the data, and that’s what linktrack gives us. Real time data about who is clicking our links and where they’re clicking in from. Without it, I wouldn’t have a clue if that stuff was working or not.

Thanks Linktrack, I promise to always use you for all my link tracking needs! You guys Rock!

Re-Target Links

One important benefit of using a full-control link tracking service like LinkTrack is the ability to re-target your links anytime you want with just a few clicks.  Here are some examples where you might want to re-target a link:

  • You’re an affiliate marketer and your parent affiliate updates their tracking software and issues new affiliate links to you.  Rather than go around and beg hundreds of web site owners to update your link, just re-target the destination in your LinkTrack account.
  • Likewise, if you decide to drop an affiliate provider – why let all your previous marFlickr photo by viZZZual.comketing effort go to waste?
  • If you’re in to social networking you probably have a profile page with Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc.  Rather than listing your home page in your profile, try using a LinkTrack link.  Not only can you see which profile is generating the most interest, but if you move web sites you can re-target them all in one place.
  • Lastly, let’s say you’re tracking traffic to a particular product on your ecommerce site and decide to stop carrying that product.  Rather than show your visitors an error page, just update your tracking link to point to your homepage, or better yet, to a similar product.

Just a few example off the top of my head.  If you have any suggestions for how to make use of re-targeted links, let us know.

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?

Split Testing Craigslist

Flickr photo by acloudmanI’m seeing a lot of uses for linktrack lately, and one of the most common is tracking Craigslist ads.

If you’ve never been to Craigslist, it’s essentially an online classified ads utility like you would see in a newspaper. The site has generated enough traffic that it’s a very viable place to buy, sell and trade products and services.

It’s so effective that some businesses have taken to posting on a daily basis to attract new business. Linktrack is a great resource for them because it gives them the opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of their ads for either split testing or as a general tracking resource.