The Problem
URL shorteners are a necessity on Twitter because of the character limit. If you’re a digital marketer and want detailed data about traffic from different social networks in your analytics, then you’re out of luck!
What many social media experts & marketers don’t realize is that major issues can occur from blindly shortening URLs to share on social media. 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. So if you don’t want to check bit.ly for the analytics data what are your options?
You either get a big lump of data marked as bit.ly which isn’t useful to anyone, or you have to tediously create separate utm tags for each social network and then shorten them – who has time for this?
The Solution
Thankfully there is a new URL shortener service utm.io, a Google Analytics Partner. So what is utm.io? It’s a URL shortener that auto tags urls with utm params. Not only that but it updates utm_source to actual traffic source sending visitors. Now you can create one link share on all social networks and then see how much traffic g+ sent vs twitter without any additional work all within the standard GA traffic sources report.
It’s a super big time saver with accurate results for any marketeer or social media expert, visit http://utm.io/
