eCommerce Social Media Review: kl.am

Posted Thursday, March 26th, 2009 by Mike Pantoliano, in Search Engine Marketing

Slowly but surely, eCommerce businesses are ramping up their social media efforts in attempt to bring in more traffic. Short URLs are a fixture of the social media world, where users of services like Twitter are forced to make each character count. Thankfully, there’s a new tool by the folks at Raven SEO Tools called kl.am, which is a URL shortener much like TinyURL with one big difference: Campaign tagging built in. Read on for how and why you should be using kl.am.

How To Use kl.am

Judging by the home page design of kl.am, the people at Raven are aiming for simplicity.

Now at this point you can enter your long, unwieldy URL and shorten it, in the same way you would with other URL shorteners like TinyURL or Bit.ly, or you can take advantage of the features that make kl.am great by clicking Kustomize.

One option is to create vanity URLs. This is a feature that is available in some other services, and works fairly simply. Without “kustomizing”, a shortened URL is given a random set of characters as the sub-folder of the kl.am domain, such as http://kl.am/du. With a vanity URL, adding a keyword to replace the characters is possible, so long as it hasn’t been taken yet. Naturally, the domainer in me went out and grabbed http://kl.am/ecommerce for our eCommerce blog ;). Now in instances around the net where someone may link to our site with our shortened URL, we receive the benefit of keyword rich anchor text.

Underneath the vanity URL option is a feature that separates kl.am from the pack. Campaign tagging is a tool that can help organize online marketing efforts to easily measure effectiveness and ROI in Google Analytics or other analytics programs. In the past, one would have to head to Google’s URL tagger to add the proper tags, then to their URL shortener to shorten the long URL. With this built in to kl.am, things get a lot easier.

Why Use kl.am

Tagging kl.am URLs allows Google Analytics and other analytics services to group your efforts. So when the big boss man wants to determine whether your latest social media campaign is paying off, you can pull solid numbers from Analytics, across many different sources. For example, by choosing the default campaign name variable in kl.am, “Social Media”, any visits to your site via that url will be marked as part of the Social Media campaign in the Traffic Sources -> Campaigns in Google Analytics.

Lastly, by creating an account at kl.am, you’ll be able to track all of the different URLs you’ve shortened with them. kl.am tracks how many clicks, referring sites, clicks by hour, and tweets including your link.  Hmmm… The above campaign appears to be an absolute bust. Back to the drawing board! :).