The more clicks you get on your AdF.ly links, the more money you earn. Although disguising of the underlying address may be desired for legitimate business or personal reasons, it is open to abuse. It is highly recommended to enable if you are using Google Analytics on your site. The only way to track clicks from your Facebook wall links is to use a URL shortening service for each external link that you post to your wall.
Please refer to Part II of this post for specific cases of tags you can create. The link subdomain does not support https out of the box. If you leave a middle-rank parameter empty, we still use the data in your lower-level parameters. The need for this came about when one of our Healthcare Marketing clients needed to track the actual impact their PDFs were having on their organic search volume, and traffic in general. A circumvention could be that a website provided its own shortlinks instead of relying on a third-party shortening service – but this is not common.
As they say, barriers can boost creativity, so people have learned to be pretty witty with 280 characters, even inventing hashtags to make the whole process easier. Some URL shortening service providers have found themselves on spam blacklists, because of the use of their redirect services by sites trying to bypass those very same blacklists. Some URL shortening services support the forwarding of mailto URLs, as an alternative to address munging, to avoid unwanted harvest by web crawlers or bots. To ensure proper tracking, use direct links to pages where Google Analytics code is embedded. By tracking those links, you can find which one is working the best.
Many extensions are available from companies you already use for domain registration — such as Hover. It's usually a good idea to announce, on any of your social media services you plan to use the shortener on, that you'll be shortening links through a custom domain form now on just so users feel comfortable clicking the links. You can always view clicks over a period of 24 hours, a month, and a custom date range. In this case, this is what I used: Category: Email Link Click – I manually named this, so it’s easy for me to see that this category includes any link on an email address.
But as Dave Winer articulated, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a shortener ourselves, and here we are. 🙂 People are already using it. With its own URL shortener, you can ensure that your long links are kept safe and secure for your visitors. Effectively the data passed is the same as before, however the call is different. This means you couldn't register, for example, domain.uk. They can also be maintained when a link source is moved within a computer. Be sure that you spell gtm.linkClick exactly as it looks: this field is case sensitive. If you are using the newer Universal tracking please refer to the docs.