There are many ways to track website traffic from your social media effort, each method has advantages and disadvantages. Let’s explore the most common two methods:
1. Using URL shortening service
Besides displaying cleaner links, one of the main advantages of URL shorteners is the ability to track and analyze click data. Most shortening services have analytics dashboard to help you track clicks. The challenge with this method however, is that you usually track your website traffic on a different system (e.g. Google Analytics or Mix Panel) and it’s often not easy to consolidate the data in one system! The other challenge with shortening URLs is that you lose your own branding, for example, instead of your audience seeing yourdomain.com/page they will see URLSortener.com/RandomText. And although you can create vanity URLs it is not a seamless process, requiring generating custom URLs for each of your links.
The other disadvantage of this method is that it doesn’t preserves your branding (your own domain), people don’t know where they would land if they click on your link (This usually yields lower click conversion than URL shorteners).
2.Using the social networks’ analytics dashboard:
Pretty much all social networks these days have their own analytics dashboards with click data included in them. Twitter for example provides click metrics for links shared in your tweets. Fedica’s Engagement dashboard also provides this data, it tells you how many times a link was clicked within each tweet, as well as aggregate click metrics for all tweets for a given period. While this is useful, it also adds the hassle of having your data into multiple dashboards.
Then there is the whole issue of segmenting your publishing calendar. If you are familiar with Fedica’s post scheduler and its pipeline system, you would know we are big fans of segmenting your posts into different pipelines, allowing you to post about different topics and pacing your posts according to each topic rather than throwing everything together.
So ideally you would track social media traffic in your website analytics dashboard and tag each campaign appropriately. But let’s be honest, it is a lot of effort having to tag each link we post with it’s campaign name.
Wouldn’t be simpler if links in your posts are automatically tagged?
The answer is YES! The Fedica scheduler can do all the heavy lifting for you, all you need to do is create different pipelines one per campaign, and simply enable “Automatic URL Tracking” in the settings of each pipeline:
Once enabled, Fedica will automatically add extra parameters to the end of each link posted from that pipeline when your posts are published to each social network, and when someone clicks on those links to visit your website, the clicks will be automatically categorized into your website analytics system with the pipeline name as a campaign name.
The beauty of all this? It’s all automated, all you need is add your posts to a pipeline
Have any questions? Let us know.