How do shortened links show up in Google Analytics?

[ErinTM]

Hey, How do shortened links show up in GA? So if I tweet about something and use bitly, does twitter get the referral? I am thinking not. I have never seen bitly show up as a referrer, but we gets lots of clicks from those links. Hmmmm. Anyone?

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[adrianvender1]

Campaign tagging is always the failsafe method to essentially 'hardcode' the campaign attribution into your links.  If the link is shared using some widget you have on your site and you have control over the code, just have these share links use campaign tagged URLs.

If somebody visits one of your page and just decides to copy and paste the URL from their browser address bar, then you'll get some directs or misc. web-based referrers.  Not too many ways to combat that. You can create some JavaScript that 'could' catch some of the web-based referrers and force some campaign attribution, but it won't catch the non-browser based clicks so it's not a perfect solution anyway.

[ErinTM]

Next question.

-- Person shares a link from our site. Someone else sees it in their feed in tweedeck and clicks. That click through is recorded as a direct.

Anyway to combat that issue?

[ErinTM]

Well, we have not done a comprehensive job of using tracking parameters, so I am assuming that's part of the slippage. Also, we have share links on millions of pages that our visitors use. So folks clicking through from tweetdeck and the like from those links would show up as directs.

[adrianvender1]

If you are tagging those bit.ly links AND still seeing 'direct' visits from those links then that would suggest a tegging error?  Is that what you're seeing? If so, can you include an example bit.ly link to review?

[ErinTM]

Thanks. We do use parameters, so we're covered there, but we are seeing an increasing number of directs in sources, which I assume is from tweedeck, et al. Thanks for the clarification!

[adrianvender1]

bit.ly and many other link shortener services will perform a 301 redirect to the destination page and will pass the referrer (if available).  If somebody clicks your bit.ly link from their twitter feed on the twitter.com web site, then twitter.com/referrer will be the source/medium.  But if somebody clicks a bit.ly link from a non-browser interface (i.e. desktop Tweetdeck or Outlook Express email) then no referrer info is passed in the headers, resulting in a 'direct/(none)' for the source/medium since GA couldn't identify a specific source.

As lhutt mentioned, you can use GA campaign tagging to specify campaign information. You can use Google's URL Builder to create campaign tagged URLs for GA:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578

[lhutt]

I believe the source not bit.ly will show up as the referrer. IMHO, the best way to track shortened links back to your site is to use the Google Parameters. Not sure if bit.ly offers a way to do this easily (Hootsuite's shortner Owl.y does)

Even so, you can add the params yourself.

So if I tweet out about a blog post on my site, I'll put this kind of link into the shortner:

www.mysite.com/postname/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mycampaign&utm_content=title-of-post

Then I am sure to be able to see my "campaign" info in a variety of ways inside of GA.

Hope that helps.