Why Do We Need More Than One Clig Per Destination URL?

Over at SEO Scoop, commenter Al asks a very good question:

In your example of creating multiple cligs, why would you need to do that when you mentioned above it that the analytics includes referral information?

The answer is tracking the sharing (spread) of the clig over time. Let’s take an example.

Suppose we create two cligs, say Clig1 and Clig2. We share Clig1 in a Facebook account and share Clig2 in twitter. Our referral stats initially show that Clig1 gets its traffic from Facebook and that Clig2 gets its traffic from twitter.

BUT: What happens when we start seeing Clig1 getting traffic from twitter? It basically means that someone reading your Facebook profile shared the same link on twitter. This sharing is a very important event in tracking how viral links are and because we know where we seeded Clig1 we know exactly what happened. We can go look for the first twitter statuses that mention Clig1 and we track the spreading of the link. The reverse spread (from twitter outwards) can be tracked for Clig2.

To rephrase this: because we know where the cligs were first shared, we can track their movement throughout the social media world. This helps us add more information to our analysis, and that’s why we need a clig for each initial seeding share, one for each social media account.

This entry was posted on Dienstag, September 16th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.