Live Oak Blog

BudURL Promotion & Analytics Lessons

This is another entry in our series regarding our promotion activities around the launch of BudURL.com. Yesterday, Mashable.com wrote a nice review of BudURL.com. The response was better than we expected - much better. Overall, we saw an 9x increase in traffic to budurl.com and registrations have increased 3x in the last 24 hours (and more are coming in each hour). This was a great boost to some of our grassroots efforts of promoting BudURL.

BUT, we learned a lot more from the results of the traffic we’ve seen.

Once we saw the article at Mashable, we proceeded to run it through our “social media promotion checklist.” This list contains about 25 various social networks that help cross-promote online content.

Traffic from Mashable was NOT the top hit. It was actually second. Surprised? I sure was. Third was RSS readers (no doubt pulling in feeds from Mashable and their subsidiary feeds). So, what was the top ranking source that drove 19% of our traffic following our write-up on Mashable.com?

The answer is StumbleUpon.com.

Why BudURL is better than TinyURL + Google Analytics

I’ve heard this statement a couple of times and I know I’ll hear it again. “I can do what BudURL does with TinyURL and Google Analytics.”

While this statement is true, what a pain! You have to create a page on your web server that collects the inbound link, add the Google Anatlyics tracking code to the page, and then go to TinyURL to create a short URL of the desired page. Then, once the click is “collected” you have to wait for Google Analytics to process this data (usually overnight). Then, when you see the number of page views you collected, you aren’t seeing which referrers were used, which networks, cities, etc. All you’ll end up getting is the quantity of clicks you received. This is assuming you understand how to create pages on your server (if you have access) and that you know how to use Google Analytics (again, if you have access).

Here is why BudURL is better than just TinyURL + Google Analytics.

To do this same process, you simply navigate to the page you want to track and click the BudURL bookmarklet in your toolbar. The URL is converted and automatically added to your list of BudURLs and tracking is automatic. As clicks are made on your BudURL, we track the click count the moment it happens (stats are real-time) and we also pick up all kinds of detail about your click so we can tell you that the tweet you posted Twitter got picked up by Facebook and Google and Yammer and spread like wildfire via email. We can tell you which geographies around the world think your link is important and we can tell you this right now. You don’t have to wait until tomorrow to find out. In fact, you can log into your account, click on the Click Stream tab, and watch the clicks as they flow through.

There is a lot more coming in the next few weeks that will take tracking clicks both on and off the web even easier. Sure, you can do this with TinyURL and Google Analytics, but who would want to do it?

Spreading the Word

In order to boost visibility to BudURL, we invited 8 “top tweeters” to use and review BudURL. Yes, it’s still a bit early as the best features aren’t public yet, but the core components are working great and the more traffic we get, the better we can test. So, we went ahead and pinged a handful of folks with a request and roadmap for future releases. The folks we chose were in the tech world and have thousands (or tens-of-thousands) of followers. I haven’t heard back from anyone officially, but I’d expect I’m one of a few hundred emails they received in the last 24 hours. I’ll be thrilled if one of them kicks the tires a bit.

sidenote: We also released a couple of bug fixes yesterday to correct some user-behavior that we had not anticipated, but that our original beta list provided over the weekend. Release Early — Release Often.