To make your future communications and interactions successful, you need to know which links customers engage with. Link tracking, or URL tracking, is a great way for marketers to see that information—it shows you which links get clicks so you can measure what’s working in your campaigns (and what isn’t).
But while businesses track links to evaluate marketing campaign success, that’s far from link tracking’s only use case.
Below, we’ll explore tracking URLs in detail, explain how they work, and outline the uses and benefits of link-tracking tools. We’ll also look at how Bitly’s link shortening and analytics tools can integrate with your campaigns for better insights into your audience.
What is a tracking link?
A tracking link is a URL that includes additional parameters—called UTM tags—to collect data about who clicked it, where they came from, and which campaign sent them. Marketers use tracking links to measure the effectiveness of campaigns across channels like email, social media, paid ads, and print.
Use a tracking link any time you send traffic to a landing page or website from an external source. Common use cases include:
- Paid advertising: Banner ads and PPC campaigns where each click should be attributed to a specific ad or keyword.
- Email marketing: Newsletters and promotional sends where you want to measure open-to-click performance.
- Social media: Organic and paid posts across platforms where social media traffic needs to be separated by channel.
- Offline campaigns: Print materials, events, and signage where QR Codes or short URLs bridge the physical and digital experience.
Tracking links look like regular URLs with tags added at the end. These tags, called parameters, indicate where a visitor comes from, what content they clicked through, and which campaign the content relates to.
You might see a URL that looks something like this:
http://www.example.com/?****utm_source****=facebook&****utm_medium****=paid_social&****utm_campaign****=spring_sale
This is a tracking link. (We’ll explore the details of the parameters a bit more in the next section.)
These links can get long depending on how many parameters you add. But as unwieldy as they can become, they’re often the best way to study the details of your campaign—including how people found you, who your audience is, and why they’re visiting your marketing materials.
How does a tracking link work?
Link tracking works by attaching a digital tracking code to a URL on your website. To create the link, you can use a URL builder to input the information from the campaign.
A URL builder relies on UTM parameters—short tags you append to a URL—to identify where a visitor came from and what prompted their click. The core UTM parameters are:
| Parameter | What it tracks | Example value |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source | The channel or platform that sent the traffic | utm_source=newsletter |
| utm_medium | The broader category of traffic generation | utm_medium=email |
| utm_campaign | The specific campaign the link belongs to | utm_campaign=spring_sale |
| utm_content | The specific piece of content or ad variation (optional) | utm_content=hero_banner |
| utm_term | The paid search keyword that triggered the ad (optional) | utm_term=link+tracking |
These are just the core parameters of tracking URLs, and marketers can add on far more than the above examples. Setting parameters allows you to track customer activity—specifically clicks and engagements—for that specific link only. Every tracking link is unique; therefore, the data for each link relates only to that link.
When someone follows a tracking link, the link stores the information in a different location than if they had followed non-tracking links. So, let’s say you want to direct your audience to a landing page by running campaigns on an affiliate blog, Google paid ads, and your company newsletter.
Each tracking link would look different, even though they would all direct visitors to the same page. The links might look like this:
- Affiliate blog: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=20_off
- Google paid ads: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=summer_sale
- Company newsletter: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=free_gift
These links will identify where the person clicked (click tracking), so it’s easier to see which medium had the best return on investment (ROI).
How to create tracking links with Bitly
Tracking links can get very long if you’re not careful. Luckily, URL shortening for link tracking purposes is fast and straightforward with Bitly.
To create a custom tracking link, follow these steps:
- Log in or sign up for a Bitly account.
- Select the Create new button at the top left of your Home page, or tap B from anywhere within the app.
- Enter your desired long URL into the Destination box.
- Customize the link by adding a Title, custom back-half, or filling in any other relevant fields.
- Select the Create button.
Once you create your link, you can share it across email, SMS, print, social media, and anywhere else that will bolster your marketing efforts.
Using your dedicated Bitly account, you can keep track of the following data on your links:
- Total engagements: The total number of clicks and interactions with your link.
- Recent engagements: All engagements within the last seven days.
- Engagement trends: A view of how engagements change over time.
- Weekly performance: The week-over-week change in engagement.
- Locations: City-level data showing where your clicks are coming from.
- Referrers: The specific websites and sources that sent traffic to your link.
- Devices: The type of device (desktop, mobile) used to click the link.
Keep in mind: Analytics features are available to Bitly’s paid subscribers.
The benefits of tracking links
Tracking links help you measure an advertising or marketing activity’s impact on your business’s growth.
If a retailer runs a sales promotion, they might see a surge of new customers. However, knowing where those customers come from is crucial to understanding the success of your campaign.
Did those customers find you organically or through a pay-per-click advertisement? If it’s through organic search, you could save a bundle by cutting your CPC campaigns.
Tracking links are a highly effective yet simple way to gather this type of information. Using these links helps you calculate ROI without manually searching through tedious data reports to see how much traffic comes from a single source.
When you use Bitly for link management, tracking links becomes easy and efficient. Bitly’s link shortener can condense long tracking links to save space on social media posts, and robust analytics make it easy to access all relevant information from multiple sources into one user-friendly dashboard.
Here’s a look at how Bitly tracking links can benefit your channels and marketing initiatives:
- Better campaign analytics: See which channels, keywords, and content types drive the most engagement—in real time.
- Online and offline connection: Bridge physical campaigns like print ads with digital tracking to measure full-funnel performance.
- Deeper audience insight: Understand how your audience behaves across touchpoints, not just where they clicked.
- Increased conversions: Use click data to refine your messaging and design campaigns that are more likely to convert.
- Simplified reporting: Pull data from multiple channels into one place and integrate with your existing analytics tools.
Better campaign analytics
Modern marketers need to know more than just where the customer started their journey—they need to know which keywords got the most attention, how people share content on social media platforms, and which demographics respond to which content.
When you use campaign management analytics on tracking links, you help your business keep up with these new needs. Links are the key to separating your campaign channels, seeing which platforms were effective, and what actions the links prompted (like joining a waitlist or buying a product).
The tags track which mediums are most effective, so you can focus on the channels customers are on. More than that, it gives you more insight into customer behavior, so there are fewer questions about which tactics worked best.
With Bitly, you can track all of your metrics from a single dashboard with the help of unique URLs. You can see how your campaigns are performing in real time, giving you a chance to adjust for better results.
Connecting your online and offline marketing strategies
With tracking links, you can directly link online and offline marketing methods and analyze offline campaign results. When executing an offline marketing campaign, you can add a tracking link to your advertisement that is 100% unique to that offline marketing activity.
For example, if you’re a restaurant publishing a newspaper ad offering 20% off to new customers, you can use the URL: http://www.yourrestaurant.com/news20.
Creating a dedicated landing page for this ad lets you track how many people view and engage with the offline advertising campaign.
Stronger understanding of audience behaviors
Everything your audience does is a message to the marketer, though it’s easy for marketers to misinterpret the signals. With the campaign analytics from tracking links, you see more than just what triggered the response. It’s easier to see how the audience reacts to content across channels—from how long they stayed on the page to whether they purchased a product.
When you can determine which digital assets have the most impact, whether that’s product pages or landing pages, you have a better idea of what’s driving the audience. No matter what stage of the funnel they’re in, you can customize your marketing efforts to meet them where they are.
Increased engagement and conversions
When you have unique campaign URLs, conversion tracking becomes easier. Once you have the data, you can design more engaging campaigns that are more likely to convert.
While consumer preferences change constantly, the shifts might not be so startling when you know how to connect with the audience. To manage it all, Bitly offers digital marketing tools to deploy your links across different touchpoints and build your brand into every click.
Simplified reporting and integration
Marketers can use tracking links to generate direct reports and integrate them into other analytical tools, creating a more complete view of your marketing landscape.
URL builders now allow for near-endless parameter additions. While generating dozens of links for a single campaign can be time-consuming, the initial effort can result in simplified reporting that shows you everything you need to know.
For instance, you can create new affiliate links for all of your influencers and see which audience demographics engage with them. When you can use seamless reports to see details you may have otherwise missed, your efforts across marketing channels become more efficient.
Real-world use cases for tracking URLs
How do you know which traffic is reaching your website from search and which traffic is a direct result of your marketing activities? With tracking URLs.
Imagine you’ve invested in a series of LinkedIn advertisements. Tracking links can tell you exactly how much traffic the LinkedIn ad brought to your web page.
It’s a more granular understanding than website analytics, which can often offer you bare-bones information about whether there was a spike after the ad. Using the information from tracked links, you can decide whether this marketing activity is cost-effective and profitable.
You can also use tracking links to:
- Measure email performance: Determine the click-through rates of an email marketing promotion to see which content resonates most.
- Evaluate paid ads: Track online ads to see how much traffic they generate and whether that traffic converts.
- Attribute social traffic: Track blog posts to see which social media platforms generate the most referral traffic.
- Track earned media: Reveal how much traffic a podcast mention, press release, or media feature actually drives to your site.
Lead generation
Tracking links reveal how people found you. These URLs can also help you qualify leads based on whether they followed the link, how long they spent on the site, and whether they took you up on the CTA.
Tracking links empower marketers to test out different lead-generation strategies because they can quantify the results of each tactic more precisely. So, if you were A/B testing a landing page variation, you could see how leads in the same demographic responded to each version.
Email marketing campaigns
Tracking links in email marketing show the number of clicks, their source, and engagement levels. This can help make email content more concise by identifying which content or promotions trigger the audience’s actions.
For instance, let’s say you’re sending an email that includes links about product manufacturing and links about products on sale. You notice that one demographic of customers only engages with the links that lead to discounts, and another demographic only appears interested in the product manufacturing information.
In future campaigns, you may consider sending out two email variations for better engagement.
Event promotion
A tracking link gives marketers an early indication of interest levels in an event, and you can use them across your promotional materials (like digital ads, social media, email invites, and QR Codes). In addition to helping you predict attendance based on the number of clicks, tracking links help you tailor your content leading up to the event and engage with attendees after it’s over.
For instance, if there was overwhelming interest in a particular speaker at an event, you might send out additional content about how you came to partner with them. This post-event communication can drive more interest in your brand and who’s behind your cause.
Cross-channel marketing analysis
A URL builder is critical for cross-channel marketing analysis. With tracking links, you can align your efforts across multiple mediums.
Marketers may not always realize how disparate their brand can look to audience segments on different channels until they can see the collective impact of their campaigns. Tracking URLs show which channels outperform others, and campaign analytics give you an idea of how audiences perceive your brand.
Social media marketing campaigns
On social media, tracking links reveal which content types drive the most engagement across different platforms. This is especially valuable for influencer campaigns, where unique links for each creator show you which audience segments connect most with your brand.
The links and subsequent analysis help you refine your strategies. Every piece of data you collect from tracking links can be key to improving engagement and converting more people.
Boost your marketing prowess with tracking links from Bitly
Tracking URLs are more than just a ’nice-to-have.’ If you want to improve your marketing strategies and get a more comprehensive view of your audience, they’re an integral part of successful campaigns.
The right links can improve ROI, lead to better campaign analytics, and give you deeper insight into the behaviors of your audience. They’re not just helpful for a current view of your campaigns—they can inform future campaigns with real, data-driven insights.
With Bitly, you can easily shorten long tracking links or even add your own branding for a polished appearance. Bitly’s comprehensive link management makes it easy for your brand to inspire customer confidence and create links that get more engagement—and you can keep track of it all in a comprehensive dashboard.
Done with campaign guesswork? Get started with Bitly for free today.
FAQ about tracking links
What’s the difference between a tracking link and a short link?
A short link is a condensed URL that’s easier to share, while a tracking link adds UTM parameters to that URL to collect data about clicks—and with Bitly Links, you get both in one: a branded short link that tracks source, medium, campaign, and more.
Can I see who clicked on my tracking link?
Tracking links provide aggregate data about your audience’s behavior, such as their geographic location, the devices they use, and the referring channels. However, to protect user privacy and comply with data regulations, tracking links do not collect personally identifiable information (PII) like names or email addresses.
What are the best tools for creating tracking links?
The best tools combine link shortening, custom branding, and robust analytics into one platform. The Bitly Connections Platform is a trusted choice for businesses of all sizes, offering the ability to create custom tracking links, generate QR Codes, and measure real-time performance all in one place.
Do tracking links work for offline campaigns?
Yes—by pairing a tracking link with a QR Code or a memorable custom domain on printed materials like direct mail, billboards, or packaging, you can measure offline engagement with the same precision as any digital click.
