I am doing some testing around the statistics packages that are included in the tap11 and Hootsuite Social Media dashboard applications today. I will be comparing their results against Google Analytics to determine how effective each of them is in gathering and displaying the traffic that is generated by their respective url shorteners.
One interesting thing that I have discovered so far is that it appears neither ow.ly (Hootsuite) or znl.me (tap11) will gather stats on a posted url unless you post that url directly through their respective dashboards.
For instance, I created an ow.ly url in Hootsuite which I then shortened in tap11 and posted via tap11 to my @uncollecting account. Only tap11 showed any clicks on that link.
I then reversed the process and posted a similar link through Hootsuite. Again, only Hootsuite showed any clicks tracked against that link.
Another problem is that Ow.ly won’t even track stats on a post unless that post has been pushed to a Twitter account – so if you want to track clicks on a post that you are sending to Facebook, you have to also push that post to a Twitter account for the click-tracking to kick in. I am not sure if this is a similar problem on tap11 yet, but I will be testing that as well.
A further wrinkle that has cropped up is that neither ow.ly or znl.me offer statistics outside of the application platform itself. While znl.me will take you into Zannel.com and provides a full list of all posts pushed to your account, staticstics do not exist in that environment.
ow.ly, on the otherhand, doesn’t even collect together your shortened url and related posts. It only displays you a catalogue of images or documents that have been uploaded via Hootsuite or directly to ow.ly for your account.
Anyways, on to the testing…
Comments