Do Something With Your Marketing: Share Tracked Links

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, I want you to commit to sharing only tracked links from now on. So one of the things that I've been watching for quite some time now is how much dark social has taken up the spaces of conversation and our ability to track what's going on not really not really happening. So if you're unfamiliar with the term, it was coined oh gosh, years ago, uh probably 2013, 2014, Radium One, I believe was one of the big companies that promoted the idea of dark social, and what it fundamentally means is that people are sharing and having conversations and talking about you uh and your company uh in places where we don't have visibility, where there's no analytics tracking, there's no uh reporting on impressions or engagement or any of those things, just happens. And it's very difficult to assign any kind of value to a channel that you can't measure. So some examples of non-dark social would be something like Facebook, for example.

Facebook allows for us to share uh links and it and tools like Google Analytics can see uh what's being shared from Facebook and assign it to uh the appropriate channel. The same for Twitter, uh LinkedIn. But if you go into your Google Analytics with the web analytics of your choice, there'll always be this big category called direct uh traffic. And some percentage of that, yes, is people just typing in your site's URL, as it is, you know, Christopher SPED.com, trust insights.ai. But a big chunk of that is people clicking on links on sites or in places where there is no attribution, there's no tracking, uh, there's no referrer data being passed.

And the only way you can get data out of places like that is if the link itself has in Google's case, UTM tracking codes. For Adobe Omniture, it's uh EDC ID codes. And even then, you're only going to get analytics on links that have tracking codes attached to them. So obviously a customer's or you know, an audience member or a prospect is not going to spend the time uh typing them in. But you can in all the links that you share, and you absolutely should be, and you can also create links that are shareable, uh memorable and easy to remember that have the tracking codes embedded in them.

You can buy custom domains, for example. If you're launching a major campaign, uh you should buy a custom domain for it and then have tracking. So, for example, when I launched my last book, I bought AI for marketers.com, and then can have different uh I know it's AI for marketersbook.com. I should even I should know that. And then you can have separate tracking codes like AI for marketersbook.com slash Facebook or slash Slack or slash whatever, so that you can track the individual channels and on the back end have those codes added when you redirect the person to the the place that you want them to go.

So examples of dark social sites, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, WeChat, Text messages, uh how many conversations have you had with somebody on with a text message? Um Instagram direct messages, um there's a whole bunch of other niche networks uh where uh there may not be a referral dating data being passed along. Uh I don't know, but I would imagine probably like Tinder doesn't pass referral traffic. I don't know why you'd be sharing your links there, but if it works, it works. Um TikTok, for example, does not uh Snapchat does not.

And so you have all these newer, very much, you know, these app-based social networks that are sharing links. People are having conversations about your brand, but you're getting no data about it. You don't know where, you don't know what from. So to the extent that you can, you want to be creating and sharing links. Now the easiest way to do that is with a URL shortener.

So you would go and take, for example, Christopherspen.com, you know, question mark UTM source equals uh TikTok, UTM medium equals social, and so on and so forth, all those tracking codes. And you would use a URL shortener to shorten that down to a much shorter link that you can then easily share. Some people like to run a link shortener on their own domain. If you uh read my newsletter, you'll see all the links are are trust insights.news. It's a URL shortener we built because we wanted stuff that was shortened consistently and trackable and under our control.

So using a that URL shortener allows you to can encapsulate all those tracking links into one blob and then share that link. And then if somebody reshares your stuff, uh you at least have some idea where it's coming from. Ideally, you're building l um links for different channels. So the links that are shared, for example, in my newsletter, all have a U UTM medium of email. The ones I post on Facebook and Twitter, those have UTM medium social so that we can keep them separate.

You want to do the same thing. You want to disambiguate as much as you can as granular as possible, so that your publishing and your sharing and your tracking back data on a channel by channel basis. Basically, if you care about the efficiency or the ROI of a channel, you should be sharing custom tracking links for that channel. If you don't care, attach some generic tracking and codes to it. So that's what I want you to do.

Share tracked links. As time goes on and we get more and more of these apps, all you know, people on them and away from the prying eyes of the public and big tech companies, we will have less and less visibility unless we are the ones who are sharing and seeding tracked URLs so that we can get at least a sample of the uh pr the people who are on those networks and interacting with us. So that's that's your challenge. Do get a URL shortener set up. Do get a good governance plan for how you're going to name the different sources and campaigns in your tracking links, and then unless unless there's some compelling reason not to, always share tracked links.

As always, please leave your comments in the comments box below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.