Andrew Watson

Awe.sm & Google Analytics

Posted on 26. Jun, 2009 by Andrew Watson in Analytics, Big Three, Shortcuts, Web 2.0

Those that know me, will be aware of my fondness of the word ‘awesome’… it is a word that really gets across the magnitude of something you are describing… ‘it was an awesome result’… ‘it was an awesome night’… ‘it was an awesome adventure’… none of those phrases describes something mediocre… and that is exactly how I feel about a new online URL shortening service I came across recently – funnily enough called ‘awe.sm‘.

What is so ‘awesome’ about it. Well for starters it uses swathes of my favourite colour, secondly it does exactly what it says on the tin and finally and perhaps the one of the most awesome adaptions of web2.0 that I have seen of late – it incorporates Google Analytics into its URL’s automatically.

I enjoy writing a number of varied posts, often they are a response to others questions and as such I provide others with a URL to a post. With this blog, this is not too difficult a process… until I start adding a favourite tool of mine into the mix… Google Analytics tracking… and then the URL can become a really ugly mess.

The solution has to be to use URL shortening services… and until today I primarily used bit.ly. Bit.ly is a simple and easy to use tool that turns http://www.creativecog.com/2009/06/22/hm-armed-forces-figures/ into http://bit.ly/ZDsrj… much more manageable – especially for those of you who use Twitter. When you start adding Google Analytics into the mix a manageable URL that you can use for different channels or users makes life so much easier.

So why would I now consider awe.sm above bit.ly ? Essentially it does the same thing – shortens my URL’s… however there is one small difference – the Google Analytics is automatically added… and that saves me time and possibly more importantly – saves me forgetting to add it. Here is an awe.sm link created to an earlier post and checkout the addition of Google Analytics http://awe.sm/N08

More services should offer this functionality, with Google supporting them by defining a set of standard for analytics variables… so much time would be saved, analytics understanding would be improved and people involved in developing and marketing websites would become smarter.