Let’s say you want to use LinkTrack to gauge traffic to particular web pages on their site. Here’s what you do:

1. Pick an image on your web site like this one: this one
2. Make a LinkTrack link directly to that image like this: http://linktrack.info/36nq0en
3. Use the tracking link in your image html like this:<img src="http://linktrack.info/36nq0en">

   and place it on your web page.

Every time your page is loaded, it will register on your tracking page! It’s no substitute for your server log files, but you can use it to track one specific web page rather than the site as a whole, or use it on sites where you wouldn’t have access to the log files.

If you were to use a smaller image like a transparent .gif or something that’s 1 pixel wide by 1 pixel tall, you would still get the tracking benefit, but the image wouldn’t even be noticeable.

Here’s my tracking picture in action:

See the tracking results at http://linktrack.info/track/36nq0en

Neat, huh?

I’m seeing a lot of uses for linktrack lately, and one of the most common is tracking Craigslist ads.

If you’ve never been to Craigslist, it’s essentially an online classified ads utility like you would see in a newspaper. The site has generated enough traffic that it’s a very viable place to buy, sell and trade products and services.

It’s so effective that some businesses have taken to posting on a daily basis to attract new business. Linktrack is a great resource for them because it gives them the opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of their ads for either split testing or as a general tracking resource.

If you’re involved in an affiliate campaign that provides a special tracking URL so you can collect commissions, then LinkTrack is definitely a good fit for you.

Not only can you disguise your affiliate links (so your users don’t know you’re an affiliate) but you can also independently track your traffic statistics and compare them to your affiliate statistics.

Email campaign tracking is pretty important. If you’re paying top dollar and investing your own time and effort into gathering an email list, writing good sales copy, and ensuring deliverability, then you want to get as much for your effort as possible.

If you’re just linking back to your site using regular URLs, consider using LinkTrack URLs instead. That way you can get an idea of what your readers are most interested in and how they’re reacting to your messages.

Once you know that, you can tailor your campaign better achieve your goals.

I’ve seen people using LinkTrack in their email signatures, and it’s a pretty cool idea. Here’s a sample email signature that I use:

Full name
Company Name
999-999-9999
name@domain.com
http://mycompany.com

Note that if you click the mycompany.com link, it’s actually a LinkTrack link. That way you can get an idea of how many people are interested enough in what you do to check out your web site.

The biggest use people have for LinkTrack is as a link shortening service. If you take a long link like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&
q=124+Grapevine+Hwy,+Hurst,+TX+76054
&sll=37.0625,-5.677068&sspn=49.978077,92.8125&ie=
UTF8&ll=32.871721,-97.16844&spn=0.0065
24,0.01133&z=17&layer=c&cbll=32.870212,-97.168443

You can shorten it so it looks like this:

http://linktrack.info/p00wwqj

As an added bonus, you can track how often that link has been clicked on. Each page gets its own tracking page like this one.

I used this the other day when I was meeting with a client. After I sent him directions, I was able to follow up on the tracking page to see that they had accessed them.

I’ve been experimenting with LinkTrack as a way to track when an email message has been opened. Essentially, if you use LinkTrack to create a tracking link to an image (like this), and then embed that image in an email, you can know when that email has been opened on the other end! Pretty cool.

This is essentially the same trick that bulk email services like Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, etc. use in their software.

This is kind of usage probably isn’t for beginners, but it is a neat trick if you’re comfortable using it.