How do shortened links show up in Google Analytics?
-
Hey, How do shortened links show up in GA? So if I tweet about something and use bitly, does twitter get the referral? I am thinking not. I have never seen bitly show up as a referrer, but we gets lots of clicks from those links. Hmmmm. Anyone?
E
-
Campaign tagging is always the failsafe method to essentially 'hardcode' the campaign attribution into your links. If the link is shared using some widget you have on your site and you have control over the code, just have these share links use campaign tagged URLs.
If somebody visits one of your page and just decides to copy and paste the URL from their browser address bar, then you'll get some directs or misc. web-based referrers. Not too many ways to combat that. You can create some JavaScript that 'could' catch some of the web-based referrers and force some campaign attribution, but it won't catch the non-browser based clicks so it's not a perfect solution anyway.
-
Next question.
-- Person shares a link from our site. Someone else sees it in their feed in tweedeck and clicks. That click through is recorded as a direct.
Anyway to combat that issue?
-
Well, we have not done a comprehensive job of using tracking parameters, so I am assuming that's part of the slippage. Also, we have share links on millions of pages that our visitors use. So folks clicking through from tweetdeck and the like from those links would show up as directs.
-
-
Thanks. We do use parameters, so we're covered there, but we are seeing an increasing number of directs in sources, which I assume is from tweedeck, et al. Thanks for the clarification!
-
bit.ly and many other link shortener services will perform a 301 redirect to the destination page and will pass the referrer (if available). If somebody clicks your bit.ly link from their twitter feed on the twitter.com web site, then twitter.com/referrer will be the source/medium. But if somebody clicks a bit.ly link from a non-browser interface (i.e. desktop Tweetdeck or Outlook Express email) then no referrer info is passed in the headers, resulting in a 'direct/(none)' for the source/medium since GA couldn't identify a specific source.
As lhutt mentioned, you can use GA campaign tagging to specify campaign information. You can use Google's URL Builder to create campaign tagged URLs for GA:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578
-
I believe the source not bit.ly will show up as the referrer. IMHO, the best way to track shortened links back to your site is to use the Google Parameters. Not sure if bit.ly offers a way to do this easily (Hootsuite's shortner Owl.y does)
Even so, you can add the params yourself.
So if I tweet out about a blog post on my site, I'll put this kind of link into the shortner:
Then I am sure to be able to see my "campaign" info in a variety of ways inside of GA.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Segment capture organic traffic? If so is it more reliable than Google Analytics?
Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ty19861 -
Is there a way to filter all computers on a specific IPv6 network in Google Analytics?
Is there a quick way of filtering the IP addresses for all the computers on a network that's using IPv6? I want to filter out visits to our websites from the devices on our office network, but each computer (and phone and tablet) seems to have a different address. It _looks _like they all start the same way, though. One computer is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:aaaa:aaaa:aaaa:aaaa, another is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:bbbb:bbbb:bbbb:bbbb, my phone is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:cccc:cccc:cccc:cccc, etc. Does this mean that xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx is the address for our network as a whole, and I can just set up a Google Analytics filter for "IP addresses starting with..."? Or would doing that also filter out hits from, like, every visitor within a 20 mile radius of our office? If I need to simply put in the individual addresses for each and every device, I will. I'm just hoping it doesn't come to that. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | BrianAlpert780 -
Cross domain tracking Google Analytics
Hi there, Got a question on cross domain tracking: We have a couple of TLD's to serve localized content to our visitors, next to our main .com TLD where our app is running as well in a subdomain. Situation is this: Local sites:
Reporting & Analytics | | jorisbrabants
marketingsite.be
marketingsite.com.br
marketingsite.fr Main site: marketingsite.com
app.marketingsite.com Conversion gets triggered when somebody ends up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse for example. People can sign up at the local site filling in their email but they end up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse Reading this article on cross domain tracking I'm getting a bit confused on the setup of the tracking code itself. The sample code provided shows these two lines: ga('require', 'linker'); ga('linker:autoLink', ['maindomain.com','targetdomain.com']); Now the question 🙂 Is it correct when I think that maindomain should be replaced with our local TLD's on every one of those, and that targetdomain is where the conversion happens? In this case the .com site?0 -
Why my WMT is showing more clicks than my Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic?
Hello Everybody, Can somebody help me figure out this puzzle: My WMT is showing 6000 clicks, while my Organic Traffic in Google Analytics is showing only 3500 daily ... how is that possible? Best Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source
I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013. it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns - on a regular basis. it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns. is it possible that it is a cookie issue? - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources. Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | S.S.N0 -
Multiple Domain Tracking with One Google Analytics Account
I am working on multiple online retail stores as follow. Right now, I have tracking facility with multiple account. Attached image can give you more idea about it. http://www.vistastores.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit
http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/
http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/ I don't want to track my statistics with multiple account. Because, it may take too much time behind Goal set up as well as analysis. Can I track all data under one account for all online retail stores? 6464019053_bda32e9fe0_b.jpg0 -
Google URL Builder Extension showing up as indexed pages.
Hello, I was reviewing my PRO member campaign report. I see that I am getting warnings for too long of URLs. However, these URLs are my website URL with the Google URL builder tracking code that I set up for my marketing campaings. Why are these being indexed? For example: www.website.com/?utm_source=Oct+Newsletter&utm_medium=e.... Thank you, Kristen
Reporting & Analytics | | KLFeichtner0