Would you like to know how many people found your blog from Mastodon? How about how many people find your YouTube channel via TikTok?
Back in my day, when someone clicked on a link from one website to another, the destination site could easily tell where the traffic was coming from. It was called the referrer. But that is no longer so simple to determine in a world filled with traffic originating from mobile app taps.
My way of solving this is to use the Redirection WordPress plugin from John Godley. I create links using this plugin to my social media accounts – such as cdevroe.com/yt which redirects to my YouTube channel (just about 500 people have clicked this link since I implemented this plugin) or cdevroe.com/ma which redirects to my Mastodon account. The plugin counts the number of times that link is clicked.
Something I do not do, but perhaps could be useful to some, is take it one step further to track both source and destination. So, on my Twitter profile I could prepend my redirects with tw — example: cdevroe.com/tw-yt (could be, but isn’t, a link from Twitter to YouTube). This would allow me to know how many times someone on Twitter found my YouTube channel.
Perhaps you’ll find this useful too!
