Link tracking helps you understand how and where your content and app share links are used. By tracking link clicks, uStudio offers valuable insights into audience discovery behavior, a key piece of information as you optimize your content and app promotional strategy.
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How does Link Tracking work?
When either an admin or audience user shares content – through the uStudio mobile or desktop application or the Management Console – the uStudio system automatically appends the URL with source data. Regardless of where the share link is sent or posted, the source data remains.
For example, uStudio weekly digests contain links to content that have s=weekly-digest-email appended to the URL. When a user clicks the link, the uStudio platform logs the date and time of the click as well as the URL source as the weekly digest email. This data is useful for companies trying to understand how their audience is responding to content notifications via email.
Savvy teams looking to add their own custom source to a link can follow the directions below. When someone clicks on a sourced link, uStudio records specific data about the interaction, including the source of the click and the time of the interaction.
Important Note: Do not alter the s=[uStudio-source] format, or link follows will not be properly attributed to the source.
How to add your own source data to content links
- As an admin, you can obtain a share link from the uStudio Management Console for the show or episode you are promoting.
- You can see the uStudio system generated source data at the end of the URL. In this case, it will say s=admin-share-link. After the uStudio source data, you can add your own source data by adding the following to the end of the link.
&c=[your-custom-term]
Here’s an example of a custom admin generated link that will be used to measure clicks on your content inside of a Viva Engage post.
- Distribute your link as you normally would by pasting it into a post, “hiding” it behind an image or button, or creating a QR code with it.
Important Note: URLs are notoriously fragile and there are many ways to break the link altogether.
We recommend having tight admin governance over the use of link tracking to be sure broken links are not distributed.
How to see Link Tracking data
You can view link tracking data through the All-Event Export in the Dashboard or via the uStudio Analytics API. Each time a user clicks a tracked link, a link_click event is logged. While these events do not include named user details (since they occur before authentication), they do capture important contextual metadata that gives you insight into how and where your links are being accessed.
To view this data in the All-Event Export:
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Go to the Dashboard in the uStudio Management Console.
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Select a date range that includes the time period you want to analyze.
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Download the All-Event Export CSV.
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Filter the
Event_Typecolumn forlink_clickevents.
When the Event_Type is link_click some or all of the following columns will be populated:
- Link Type – Identifies where the link was generated, such as from an email digest, a new episode email, or a share link generated in the Admin Console or from an End User Application.
- Link Source – Identifies where the user originally accessed the link, such as from an email digest, a new episode email, or a share link generated in the Admin Console.
- Link Campaign – Displays any custom campaign tag your organization appended to the share link for tracking promotional effectiveness.
- Link Company Code – Shows the company code embedded in the link path.
- Link URI – Captures the portion of the share link that follows the company code, including segments related to the show, episode, source, and campaign information when available.
