The screenshot below shows referrals from Twitter in the Social > Network Referrals report, after clicking on Twitter to segment specifically to that channel. Marketers can use this section to get an excellent peek at sessions, conversions, and other stats from social media referrals but is useless without proper data.
In addition to not showing correctly in referral reports, social visits from shortened URLs won’t be counted in the Social section of analytics. Some shorteners like Twitter’s t.co will pass on the referral source properly, but you can’t always trust the source to come through on its own. In the process of redirecting the URL from the bit.ly link to the link, the source gets lost and is seen simply as a direct visit. This means the content received many more sessions from Twitter than was reported.īecause direct traffic lumps together any sessions where Google could not identify a specific source, you can see how easy it becomes for a URL shortener to hurt your ability to track a proper source. Granted, some differences will occur between bit.ly and Google Analytics (the GA view shown below filters out sessions from some IP addresses, and bit.ly is less restrictive about tracking bot clicks) but, it’s safe to say most of the 44 direct sessions recorded have been misattributed and are a result of users clicking on the link via Twitter, not visiting the content directly. Well, let’s take a look at bit.ly’s analytics for the link.īit.ly shows 47 clicks coming from the shared link. Wow, not an impressive Twitter showing, huh? The stats are segmented by Source/Medium for a specific landing page.Īs you can see, Google Analytics shows the primary source as Direct, with only three clicks coming from Twitter (note that in this case the source showed up as, possibly from a URL tagger as will be explained later, but generally Twitter links show up as t.co). So, how exactly does this happen? Let’s take a look at the results from an infographic that was promoted primarily via social media with a shortened URL. If your boss or client sees skewed results - fewer sessions and conversions from social media than should be attributed - it may be decided that social media is something he or she no longer wishes to continue. In fact, relying on URL shorteners to aid the social management process can ultimately hurt social media in an organization and downplay its value by eliminating important social traffic data in Google Analytics. You’re impacting the central data for your website in Google Analytics, which is much more important (and telling) than any one-off analytics data you’ll receive from that URL shortener. cancerous shortened dead urls everywhere.What many marketers and social media experts don’t realize is that major problems can occur from mindlessly shortening URLs to share on social media. As URL shortening services become obsolete (which they will), this is exactly what is going to happen. with no way for me to clean them up, and as a result they also lost organic search results.
#Owly shorten url install#
The owners of the site decided to install a shortener, it became unsupported and essentially they left the web with thousands of dead links in retweets, share-this, facebook links. I’ve experience this personally with a site that had over ten years of articles. htaccess redirects for the urls for any links you want to shorten the url on ~ if you still insist try Shorty and/or Alex King’s Twitter Tools now supports a shortener …but let me warn you that if you use a plugin and/or shorty and it becomes unsupported then essentially, you’ll have broken links everywhere on the web, which is likely the reason that called it a cancer since you’ll be polluting the web with dead links. ~ my best advice would be to shorten your own domains in the way that you set up the s options or create. is right U is for Universal and by following some easy w3c recommendations and guidelines we might make some sense of this internet thing. “nature of the beast” is b/c folks choose to make it that way.
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