13/06: Tracking And Cloaking Links

If you have been promoting anything online for even a moderate amount of time, you will have seen at least some advice about tracking your links and ads. It is good advice, because if you have no idea how many people are clicking on things, you have no way of measuring the effectiveness of what you are doing and therefore no idea of what to change and what to leave alone. 

This applies to all of your links, whether they are contained in an email or located on your website or blog. If you are an affiliate, there are other benefits to tracking/cloaking your affiliate URL's too. The occurrence of affiliate link theft is probably overstated, but it doesn't do any harm to protect yourself against it and have the added benefit of more "user friendly" links. 

I'm offering two solutions to link tracking/cloaking - yes I know there are countless ways of doing this, but these two alternatives are aimed at those with limited technical knowledge. There are other alternatives, but some of the free services have saturated the market and click through rates have suffered. One ofthese suggestions requires that you have your own server space, the other doesn't, but both are free.

1) MyLinkGuard.com is a free system from Richard Legg. By using it you can easily turn long ugly affiliate links into far more appealing ones and secure them from most prying eyes. As an added benefit will create an additional income stream by using the program. Downsides - you will have to join a mailing list to get access (the number of emails is not ridiculous though), you must have hosting space somewhere even if it's with a free provider, and it's not the best way forward for tracking. On the whole though, it's a great and simple to use link cloaker for the price - i.e. free!

2) ClickAudit.com is probably the simplest way to both track and cloak your links. Sign up free at the website, type in the url you want to track, hit a button and presto, one cloaked link with tidy looks and real time tracking. Couldn't be simpler. 

Note, to affiliates - whatever systems you use for link tracking/cloaking, be sure to read the terms of any company you are promoting. Some have strict rules about what you can and can't do with your affiliate links. 

Unfortunately this service seems to be having issues with the Firefox browser and is returning "Web Forgery" warnings on all of its links as of September 2008. Probably a bad idea to use it until resolved - at least check your links before making them public.

TCH

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