Easily Track Clicks On Your Blog

If you (seriously) want to make money with your blog, sooner or later, you will have to offer direct advertising. This means setting your own ad rates for individual sponsors. Since there is no ad network involved you need to track clicks.

How To Track Clicks?

You can to track clicks on your blog using the following three methods:

1. Using Link Shorteners
2. Using WordPress Plugins
3. Using Google Analytics (Yes, it's possible!)

Link Shorteners

If you decide to use link  shorteners, then bit.ly is the best one. It offers you detailed statistics about number of clicks, location and user agent (browser, twitter, email client etc.) and you can also use custom links.

However, I strongly discourage link shortners for affiliate links! Why? Because bit.ly/productname does not look nice!

WordPress Plugins

This is my favorite part! Using plugins, you can easily track links and also make affiliate links look good as well as personalized. Doesn't http://bloggingwithsuccess.net/recommended/chitika look much better than bit.ly/chitika?

Here are two good plugins to track links:

1. GoCodes: GoCodes lets you create simple redirects like yourdomain.com/go/your-keyword. It is easy to use and you can easily track clicks with it. Download GoCodes.
2. Redirection: This is much more powerful than GoCodes. You can create custom URL structures (not limited to /go/keyword/ ). We use it to track our affiliate links. In fact, the Chitika link I mentioned earlier has been created by using that plugin. It can also create groups to organize links if you have lot of them. Download Redirection.

Google Analytics

To track clicks with Google Analytics, you will have to do some manual coding. You need to structure your links like this:

<a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.com');">

Here example.com is the name of target website/page. You can view reports in "Top Content" view of Google Analytics.

These were three easy methods to track outgoing links. What methods do you use? Let us know through comments.