Internet Marketing & Recruiting

by Travis Scott | RainierDigital | April 19th, 2009

A few weeks ago I espoused Digg’s URL shortening tool- DiggBar. It is extremely convenient and I began using it fairly consistently to not only link to various articles I would post on Twitter or send via email, but to also promote new content on my blog via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to name a few. After a day or so of doing this I noticed something strange when analyzing the Google Analytics for my website. I was generating a lot of traffic from Digg.com but next to nothing from the other sources that had consistently sent readers in the past. I realized that, regardless of the website my users were visiting when they clicked on my link, it would always show them being delivered by Digg.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me when I am trying to fine tune the marketing of my blog because I obviously am not getting an accurate picture of where my traffic is coming from and any trends that may be associated with this.

With that said, its a great tool for general use and I am still using the it to shorten the URLs of other pages I link to via Twitter or email, but have ceased using it to promote links on my own website. In the meantime, its back to using tinyurl and bit.ly.

Travis Scott RainierDigital Original Digg, DiggBar, URL shorteners

I thought this was a timely article, given my last post about Digg’s new URL shortening service, although it’s not one of the services analyzed.  Honestly, I was surprised with how many of these services existed.  I used bit.ly and Tinyurl before Digg’s tool came out this week.

Apr 4, 2009 at 12:20am ET by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land

URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day?

See the results and read the complete article here:  Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?.

Travis Scott External Content Tinyurl, Twitter, URL shorteners