Although there are many URL shortening services out there like TinyURL, the newest one to hit the netwaves is Cligs, and it's a winner (and free). The most obvious gotta-have-it features are the built-in analytics reports. Every Clig you create is stored in your own private account and reports are available to track:
- Total number of hits
- Referral statistics
- Recent mentions of the clig itself on twitter
- Recent links (mentions) of the clig on blogs
- Recent web links to the clig
- Recent mentions of the destination URL on twitter
- Recent blog links to the destination
- Recent blog links to the destination
- Recent web links to the destination
- Delicious bookmarks of the destination
- Total number of links to the destination
That by itself is really cool, but it gets even cooler. You see, you can create different Cligs for the same destination, and track hits based on where you've used the Clig. Confused? Let me explain better. Let's say I want to track my social promotion efforts to this post. I would set up a short url (Clig) to this post and share it via Twitter. I could then set up another, different Clig to this same post, but share it via Plurk. I could then see which Clig brought the most traffic, and analyze the rest of the metrics separately as well. Pretty cool, huh? You can have as many Cligs to the same destination as you want. That's micro-tracking down to the infinite level. 🙂
Oh, and did I mention it's SEO friendly? Yes, yes, I did - in the title of this post. Just in case some page that shows your Clig gets lots of juice, you won't lose out on that juice. Cligs are 301'd, so any and all link love gets passed right through to your lovely page.
There are some other cool features coming very, very soon, so watch out for them. (Maybe I even had a hand in suggesting those cool features...hehe).
The owner of Cligs is a friend of mine, and probably many of you as well - Pierre Far, aka eKstreme. I'm glad Pierre's my buddy, because otherwise I might not have known about this awesome new URL shortening service. Now you know about it too. 🙂 And if you want to hear him explain it in a video, you can check that out here.
Go grab your very own free account at cli.gs .