In the influencer marketing universe, knowing what works and what doesn't is the key to success. One way to determine if your strategy is on track is through tracking, which is achieved through tools such as tracking links. This revolves around tracking links that allow you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns, better understand your results and make the necessary adjustments. Therefore, in this blog article, we will address the most important points about tracking links and how you can use them to get the results you want. Let's get to it!
It is a URL that has been modified to track the source of traffic or conversions that can be attributed to a specific marketing channel.
In influencer marketing, tracking links make it possible to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns developed with content creators. With these links it is possible to determine precisely how much traffic, sales and conversions are being generated by the mentions made by the influencer you are collaborating with.
Read also: How to measure your influencer marketing success
Affiliate tracking links are a specific form of tracking links, but they are used specifically in the context of affiliate marketing.
When an affiliate promotes a product or service, they are provided with a unique tracking link. If someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, the affiliate receives a commission. Affiliate tracking links are used to track which sales and conversions were generated by which affiliates.
So while both types of links are used to track user behavior, affiliate tracking links have a more specific purpose related to tracking and compensating affiliate sales.
To create tracking links you can use online tools. Here are some of the platforms most commonly used by marketers in their campaigns.
Google Analytics has a tool available for users to create tracking links. If you want to use this platform follow these steps:
Bitly is a platform that allows you to shorten links and in turn, makes it easy for you to track user interactions with the links. By shortening a URL with Bitly, you can track how many people click on the link, from which geographic locations and the devices they connect to.
To create tracking links in Bitly, follow these steps:
UTM.io is a very useful URL tracking and UTM generation tool that allows marketing teams to create, share and sync UTM tags for their campaigns. This tool allows you to create standardized UTM parameters, which makes data analysis easier. Like Bitly, UTM.io features a URL shortener to make your links more user-friendly. It also offers templates to save time when creating multiple URLs with similar parameters. One of UTM.io’s strengths is its ability to integrate with other tools, such as Google Analytics.
To generate tracking links in UTM.io follow these steps:
Website URL: The URL of the page you want to direct traffic to.
HubSpot is a multifunctional platform for marketing and sales that also includes URL tracking tools. HubSpot allows you to monitor how many people click on your links and how they interact with your website.
To create your own link in HubSpot you must:
Tracking links are essential to measure the performance of an influencer marketing strategy. Through them, it is possible for brands to accurately quantify the impact of the influencer’s actions. This includes tracking how many people have clicked on a link and, of these people, how many have taken a specific action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter.
Another advantage of tracking links lies in their usefulness for optimizing marketing strategies for businesses. Thanks to the ease of collecting and analyzing data related to the performance of your campaigns, brands can make informed decisions to improve their future strategies.
You might be interested in: Influencer marketing and sales: How to convert followers into customers?
Follow links also facilitate performance-based payments for influencers. In some cases, collaboration agreements between brands and influencers are established based on sales generated from the content creator’s posts, i.e. the creator receives a commission or payment for successfully completed business transactions. So with tracking links, it is possible to accurately track the conversions made by each influencer you work with.
With tracking links, we can measure several metrics among which stand out:
With a URL it is possible to know where visitors come from to your digital platforms. In the case of campaigns with influencers, you will be able to know how much traffic the sponsored content of this particular content creator generated. We recommend reading Kolsquare’s blog: Everything you need to know about sponsored posts.
ROI is one of the most important points of any strategy, so by tracking conversions and associating them with specific campaigns, you can calculate the ROI of your marketing efforts.
This metric provides insight into the level of interest and engagement your audience exhibits towards your communications or advertisements. In influencer marketing, it gives you the possibility to know how much attention the sponsored content created and shared by the influencer attracted.
Tracking links helps you understand what kind of actions your target audience takes from each communication: Do followers buy from an advertisement? Do they sign up for a newsletter? Do they download collateral such as eBooks? With all this information you can adjust your advertising strategy and offer valuable content.
A tracking link allows you to identify whether users who click on your link perform the actions you expect, such as buying a product, purchasing a service or registering for a specific event.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
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