Instagram URL Tracking and Redirect : GoDaddy and HostGator

As we mention throughout the guides and email challenge, tracking the click-throughs from Instagram to your blog or whichever link you are promoting is important because brands care about the cold, hard numbers about the conversions from the campaigns.

When you do a sponsored post for a brand, you should follow-up with links to all the posts across social media channels as well as the numbers of likes, comments, click-throughs to the blog (if there is a correlating blog post which most brands want).

The URL that you input in your Instagram profile will not show up in Google Analytics unless you add in Google Tracking Parameter.

GODADDY INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Login to Godaddy.
2. Go to Hosting
3. Click the Green Manage Button next to the domain name you want to do this on.
4. Go to File Manager in the green bar across the top
5. Click on the Public_HTML Folder
6. Click +File in the top left
7. Name it ig.html  (You can name it whatever you want, but ig.html is nice and short)
8. Click “Create New File”.
9. Go back to the area to manage stuff where you Clicked on the File Manager
10. Click on Redirects under the Domain section]
11. Type = Permanent
12. Select the domain on the drop down.
13. After the / type in ig.html (or whatever call to action you may want to name it).
14. Redirects to http://www.yourdomainname.com/?utm_source=Instagram&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Desc
    1. Change “www.yourdomainname.com” above to your domain.
    2. utm_source=Instagram (Do not change)
    3. utm_medium=referral (Do not change)
    4. utm_campaign=Desc (You can change this to track different campaigns during the time period the post is listed)
15. Keep Redirect with or without www. checked.
16. Click Add.

As with coding and software engineering, you always need to check your work. So go ahead, test it out: Go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/ig.html. Does it go to your blog’s main page with the URL including the tracking on it (for example: http://littleprettyliz.com/?utm_source=Instagram&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Instagram_Referral) ? If so, great! It worked! If it doesnt, contact godaddy support for further assistance.

Now use http://www.yourdomainname.com/ig.html as the link in your bio.

Done and DONE! No go pat yourself on the back. ?

You will now see IG traffic under Acquisition with the other Social Media channels (I whited out a few channels, but you can see Instagram in the view below). If you want it to list somewhere else than you change the parameters.

Here is an article and form to build your urls https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

(You can use this if you place an ad somewhere and want to track the traffic also.)

Host Gator Instructions: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/url-redirect-how-to-create