URL Cloaking Reviewed: Cli.gs URL Shortener with Analytics
I have been on a twitter for a little over 1 month now. I have built up a decent following (Follow Me On Twitter) on Twitter. I try to keep track of a lot of the new tools that I find that relate to twitter. I found one that I really liked called TwitPwr. It is basically a URL shortener just for tweets (posts on Twitter). It has a downside though. It does not have any analytics in it whatsoever. It has advantages like its top 25 users list, recent URL's created, etc. but it pales in comparison to what Cligs can provide. Whenever you create a Clig (what they call a shortened URL) it will give you several options for copying the link.
First it will give you just the standard link already embedded on their page, which you could copy and paste wherever you needed to use the link. Next it gives that same link in a text box if you are one of those people who like to double click to highligh the text. Kind of like what you might do if you were using TinyURL. The next text box gives you the HTML link option. This will embed the link into a page with the Clig URL as the text and no title text. The third text box gives you the option of doing the same thing, only it will use the orignal URL of the link you shortened as the title text. It still uses the Clig URL as the text.
Of course if you know a little basic HTML on how to modify links, you can change all of these options with ease. Most people will not need to make any modifications. It would be nice though if it had a wizard you could use to set the different options like the title text and the text used to link to the site. Actually, it does have that. I haven't fully checked out all of the features available on the site yet. Doing that as we speak. The first advanced feature is vanity URL's.
With the vanity URL's feature you can create a URL of your choice instead of using the randomly generated URL that is created when you add a new Clig. You could have something like http://cli.gs/productname. Don't click on that link by the way... it is a bogus link. This would be very useful for Internet Marketers sending links out to their email list. It is a lot more attractive than using the encrypted looking links. It also provides the feature that I didn't think it had a minute ago. You can change the title text by filling out the form with whatever you want to be the title text.
Now a feature that I have not seen on any other URL shortener is the ability to add custom forwarding options. Cligs has a Geo Location feature that lets you determine where your click throughs are coming from. It is a very nice feature. In fact it is my favorite feature of Cligs. An added feature to that, is the ability to use the custom forwarding to re-direct traffic from specific locations or countries to a different URL than the default URL. This could be extermely useful in diverting foreign traffic away from your site if you didn't want a certain country to see the target location you were directing traffic to.
The next feature is the ability to directly tweet your newly added Clig from the cli.gs website. So if you tweet a lot about sites you visit, then you have an easy option to creating that tweet about the URL. You won't need to copy and paste anything. Now when you use the next feature, Analytics, you will be able to get some good details about your Clig URL. You will know exactly what countries your click throughs are coming from. In addition you will see a list of referrer URL's to let you know what sites the traffic is coming from. Another nice feature is if you hover your mouse over the geo location map, you can tell immediately how many hits are coming from each of the countries.
Now the next feature I am going to talk about is the ability to duplicate Cligs. Now this is a huge feature. If you are trying to get traffic from multiple locations to a single destination URL, how are you going to know which is bringing you the most traffic? You need good analytics to do that. Basically once you create a Clig URL, you will have the ability to duplicate that Clig's source URL. This will create a brand new Clig. Using these separate URL's you can determine which is bringing you the most traffic. It can also help you determine if a URL is going viral. So if you placed a URL on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, you could tell if that URL on each of these sites is being posted on other Forums, Blogs, and Social Media sites. Once you know which sites are the most effective you can use that to your advantage to create the most efficient and effective marketing campaigns for your website.
Hope this post was helpful for you, and I urge you to setup a Clig account today... as it is an absolutely phenomenal service. Why? All those features built into that site and it doesn't cost you a single dime.