How To Build Real-Time Reports On Your Custom Links Data From Rebrandly

Rebrandly is a link management platform that lets you brand, track, and share short URLs using custom domain names.

In essence, companies can create short, custom URLs that will be used primarily by mobile phones and that become accessible either by generating a dynamic QR code or very simple URLs.

Those links conveniently direct a consumer to a landing page that holds the information or offer that the company wants to put in front of people’s eyes.

Rebrandly is an ideal tool to identify best locations, such as shops, ads, and product placements. It does not require the company to modify its website or add multiple cookies or pixels to track the referrals. Many of these are incorrect due to ad-blockers and other security and anonymity tools anyway.

The platform can also be used effectively for A/B testing, price comparisons, location comparisons, promotions, contests, and even online assistance.

How Does Rebrandly Work?

When a consumer uses their mobile phone to snap the QR code, two things happen.

First, a user link is captured and sent to Rebrandly. And second, the user is redirected to the web page that the company chooses.

The best use of the platform might be to replace all of your website’s tracking pixels and social media links in order to avoid overloading your website with foreign scripts, which might cause it to slow down.

You can even use Rebrandly links for all of your marketing campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Google, Bing ads, and others.

How To Leverage Your Rebrandly Links Data?

A limited built-in analytics module

Rebrandly collects and stores some basic information about the location of the device in use as well as the tags that you added to the link. It provides some basic reporting capabilities, as well.

However, Rebrandly does not have all the capabilities you would need if you ever want to dig deeper into the details of the data, create custom data, or have the ability to slice and dice the data unless you are willing to pay for custom software development and Amazon S3 storage. The latter might get you access to your data, but it will come with a heftier price tag.

Additionally, Rebrandly has limits to how much detail into your data it offers you. For example, you can get the city where the visitor was at but not the zip code/postal code.

Using ClicData To Build Custom, Real-time, and Insightful Reports

Many of ClicData’s marketing customers are using Rebrandly and have requested a connector to Rebrandly, so they can use ClicData’s features to work with their data more effectively. Unfortunately, Rebrandly does not have an API that can be used to retrieve its visitor data.

Still, with ClicData’s API, you can enhance Rebrandly links by adding a tag that has an event to call a script. That way, you can send the data—in real time—to your ClicData tables.

How do I get started?

Start by getting a Rebrandly account and creating a link you want to share. It can be associated with a QR code for in-store tracking, or it can simply be a link you want to use on your social media campaign.

When visitors use the QR link or click on your ad, they are immediately redirected to a Rebrandly page, which then redirects them to the landing page of your choice.

While the consumer does not see the interim page—it is just a redirect—the visit allows Rebrandly to capture some data, such as the user’s device location, type, date, time, and so forth. You can also set up tags to identify the links that were used and you can enhance the data capture to give you the ability to cross-relate data from different campaigns and links.

Here are just a few common use cases of Rebrandly:

• Branding and tracking links on LinkedIn,
• Indexing custom short links on Google Search Console,
• Using UTM parameters to track conversions,
• and many more.

Rebrandly collects the visit data into their own storage containers and provides standard and custom reports that you can run on demand. Custom reports are limited to the data and tags that Rebrandly collects for you.

If you subscribe to Rebrandly’s upper-tier subscription packages, you can connect Amazon S3 and other types of cloud object storage for the platform to use to store your data. You will still need to connect to it and use your own data visualization tool to build insightful reports.

Collect and visualize data in real-time

With ClicData’s business intelligence platform, you can use Rebrandly more efficiently and collect any data you want—in real time—without having to purchase additional tools and without extensive technical knowledge.

To make the best use of it, you will need to add a script to each of your links, or you can create a tag to apply to all the links you want to track and attach a script that calls the ClicData API to register the visit in real time.

Then, when the visitor uses the link—and while Rebrandly is capturing some data and is readying itself to redirect to your landing page—a ClicData script sends data directly to your ClicData account.

To use the script, first create a table in ClicData, replicating the structure of the data you want to capture. For example, you might want to capture date, time of visit, campaign ID, zip code, device, and so on.

Back on your Rebrandly page, you will then modify the link for each of the campaigns you want to track in real time.

To do that, you will add a ClicData script, tailoring it to reflect the columns of data you want to capture:

      // Lets get info for this IP address
      $.getJSON("<https://freegeoip.live/json/>", function(data){
        registerVisit(data)
      });

      // Register this in ClicData
      function registerVisit(addrInfo)
      {
        // Specify your Data Clone Id
        dataCloneId =  123456;

        // Expected Data Schema:
        // - Date   (date/time)
        // - Country Name (text)
        // - Region name (text)
        // - Region Code (text)
        // - City (text)
        // - Zip Code (text)
        // - IP address (text)
        // - Page Url (text)
        // - Browser Language (text)

        var settings = {
                        "url": "<https://api.clicdata.com/data/>" + dataCloneId + "/rows",
                        "method": "POST",
                        "timeout": 0,
                        "headers": {
                          "Content-Type": "application/json",
                          "Authorization": "Basic {MUST ENTER YOUR OWN KEY TOKEN HERE}"
                        },
                        "data": JSON.stringify({"data":[ [  new Date(), 
                                                            addrInfo.country_name,
                                                            addrInfo.region_name,
                                                            addrInfo.region_code,
                                                            addrInfo.city,
                                                            addrInfo.zip_code,
                                                            addrInfo.ip,
                                                            window.location.href,
                                                            navigator.language || navigator.userLanguage
                                                            ]]}),
                      };
        $.ajax(settings).done(function (response) {
          // All good
        });
      }

The above script captures information, including the campaign ID. If you use this script, be sure that your dataset has the same exact column layout.

That is it!

As soon as your visitors begin using your Rebrandly links, you begin tracking their visits in real-time in your ClicData’s dashboard.

In Short…

Rebrandly and ClicData work well together and provide an efficient way for you to monitor promotional any type of social media, magazine or in-store campaigns, in real-time and in an affordable way. No additional tools, connectors, or subscriptions are needed.

Schedule a one-on-one demo! See it in action or let us help you set up ClicData and Rebrandly for your organization.

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