Blogging Tips

Cligs provides in-depth monitoring and tracking for your short URLs. They were recently acquired by Mister Wong – a well-known social bookmarking tool. A free account is needed if you’d like to keep your statistics private. They offer a bookmarklet that you can add to your bookmarks toolbar for easy access, as well as a few other tools. In their own words, Cligs equals “short URLs with analytics, social media monitoring and geotargeting”.

Creating a new Clig is easy; all you need is a URL. Once you create it, you’re given 3 different types of embed codes – a direct link, HTML link and HTML link with title. You can then edit your Clig. Doing this allows you to add your own title and rename your Clig to something more meaningful. You can also tweet it, post it to identi.ca or duplicate it.

A very interesting feature under editing is that you can apply geolocation rules to your Cligs. You can choose a country and specific destination URL for the country. For instance, if you wanted all visitors from China to be taken to a different URL upon clicking, you can set that up here. You can add as many rules as you like.

Under “My Cligs” is where you’ll see a list of your shortened URLs along with the Clig’s name, the day, date and time it was created and number of hits. “Only human hits are shown.” There is an admin column that lets you delete a Clig, edit it or view statistical details pertaining to it.

On the details page you’ll have 4 different tabs to view: summary, referrers, bots and social media. Summary lets you see an “Executive Summary” of the URL along with any notes that you can add yourself. You’ll see the total clicks and then graph of the hits per day for the last 30 days. At the bottom is a graph where you can view your hits on a world map.

The Referrers tab, as you’ve probably already guessed, shows you the source for your URL clicks. Bots shows you how many hits from bots your URL has; this is the only place that tracks bot statistics. Finally, the social media tab will show you how many times your URL was mentioned on Twitter or FriendFeed. So far, it looks as though these are the only 2 social media sites included.

Lastly, you can also create API keys to be used 3rd party tools and applications if needed. “Cligs integrates with 3scale Networks for API usage tracking.” If there are any features you’d like to create, they gladly accept suggestions and feedback. All-in-all, Cligs seems to be a decent Bit.ly-like alternative, although I don’t know if I’d personally switch.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.