How do you track badges?

[connectiveWeb]

I have had some success these days with a couple of badges I have created. It wasn't too difficult for the efforts to result in a bunch of links as they where on topics people are very passionate about.

My question is how do people usually keep track of what websites their badges end up on besides watching for analytics visits? There has to be an easier way to know who has used your badge on their website?

[connectiveWeb]

They dont use buttons no. They are basically text area fields that auto-select all on focus. Then the user can copy/paste into their website.

Your ideas for writing blog posts about people who use the badge is really really good though. Thanks for that

[firstconversion]

Do you have a button that users click on somewhere in the badge getting process? Could count button clicks

Otherwise have a page that links to everyone who uses your button if they leave an web address - thatd probably also boost your button uptake. or if thats too spammy, write a blog post a week about a site that uses your button - will help grease the wheels of collaboration in your vertical

[connectiveWeb]

Thanks for the input Alan Having a form would certainly be a sure fire way to track down where the badge ends up. I'm not wanting to do that though to keep it really simple for end users. More hoops to make them jump through, im guessing, would decrease the number of people who actually use it.

I may be stuck just checking on referring URL's to the landing page I set up for it I guess.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Rodney,

In my experience the only proper way to do this is to provide a mechanism where potential users are required to fill out a simple web form in order to gain access to them.  Name, Web Address of the site it'll be used on, and email address are ideal fields.

And even then, some people may choose to fill in phony info.

If you want to go even further, the image would be stored on your servers and loaded on their sites dynamically.  The problem with that is the delay in displaying as it pulls the image from your server onto their site.

Barring that, you're left to perform a search for that graphic out on the web, which is far from accurate.