Home » Social Media » BudURL: URL Shortening plus Real-Time Tracking
BudURL: URL Shortening plus Real-Time Tracking
BudURL sticks out from the URL shortening crowd by adding some interesting tracking tools.Just like it's popular competitor TinyURL, BudURL allows you to easily shorten long URLs, enabling the use of links within confined posting spaces.
Turn:
http://www.congruentmedia.com/pub/eNewsletter-Campaigns-and-HTML-Email
into:
This is invaluable when message space is at a premium on microblogging sites like Twitter, which only allows 140 characters per post. But there are lots of services like this out there and if merely judging by space, BudURL certainly doesn't offer the shortest URL.
What sets BudURL apart is the real-time tracking the service offers. After you've posted a shortened URL, you can view each time your link is clicked, the site where your link was viewed and the IP address of the person clicking your link. (I don't know if I like this last part...) All of this can be seen in real-time from your auto-refreshing dashboard:
This is a really cool tool to add to your tracking arsenal. On my first test with Twitter, I quickly saw a number of referals from aggregation sites that were reposting my link. I could literally watch, in real time, as my link played leapfrog across the internet.
Of course it's also useful for just seeing the volume of clicks your link is getting, which can tell you about your audience, and how much of their attention you have.
It's certainly not a surefire analytics tool, nor should social media ever be tracked merely in numbers. But it's useful for seeing how far your microblogging reaches, and it fulfills it's core service of allowing you to link to long URLs. Of course, it works outside of the microblogging world too.
Signup was a breeze, and it's free. Definitely something worth checking out.
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Thanks Again!
Andy
budurl.com
The domain name is a little weirder, but it seems to offer the same service with a few more bells and whistles- like a well-documented API and stats on social media and search engine mentions.