Go Short! Use bit.ly for Your Digital Real Estate Ads

Real estate agents can use the URL shortener to measure in digital.

One thing about web links is this: they aren't pretty. They're often long and very complex-looking. And when real estate agents want to share links to their website, listings or other digital content, it can be somewhat clunky.

For example, the link to this blog post:

http://retechnology.com/agent/articles/how-does-retargeting-for-real-estate-marketing-work

Of course, that's not very nice to insert into text. So instead, you can embed the link in your copy. It would look like this: How does retargeting for real estate work? Then you can use it cleanly in an email or blog post.

But one downside to linking directly to your real estate website or real estate content is that it can be tricky to measure how many people actually click on it. If you use Google Analytics, you'll get some data under what's called "referral" data, as in a list of sites that referred traffic to you.

If you have a Google Analytics account, go to the left-hand side, click "Traffic Sources" followed by "Referrals." A table displays the names of domains referring traffic to your site, as well as statistics on how visitors react to what they find.

But there is another way to track clicks on URLs. That is to use a URL shortener. In this case, bit.ly.