With so many marketing tools and analytics platforms, you may sometimes feel helpless trying to understand what’s going to actually help you connect A to B to C - or connect a Tweet to a sign up or sale.

However, while Groups are great for organizing links on a high level, Tracking Tags allow you to get much more detailed information for each individual link. Using our Tracking Tags feature allows you to qualify a link on five different levels.

  • Campaign: This is the large scale effort, or reason, you're creating a link. Examples might include “summer-promotion” or “meetup-group” or “sean-connery” (if you just happen to have a promotion with Sir Sean Connery running).
  • Source: This is the place people are coming from. Use this to represent where you will be posting the link. Always use a lowercase version of the domain. Examples: “growthhackers” “inbound” “facebook”.
  • Medium: This is the type of post you are sharing, such as “post” as a generic answer, or “blog-comment” if you are putting this in the comments of someone elses blog, or “quora-answer” if you answered a Quora question.
  • Term: The keyword used in the ad. Especially handy for AdWords ads to differentiate between keywords.
  • Content: Use the keyword in the headline of an image ad, or the “theme” of the Facebook ad for this parameter. For example, maybe your call to action is “GeteBook” vs “SubscribeNow.” Use those as CTAs in this parameter.

An example of how to use Tracking Tags

To better understand how these new Tracking Tags might be useful for you, here's a brief example.

Imagine this: You're promoting a new book through two channels, Facebook and your blog, and you are sending visitors directly to a third-party store where they can purchase it. You would love to know which channel is more effective, but you can't see each store's analytics. Tracking tags allow you to compare those two channels! To do this, you would create two links, one for Facebook and one for your blog. For one of the links, you would add a tag for Source called "facebook". For the other, you could add one called "myblog" (or however you want to refer to it).

After publishing your two ads and getting some clicks, we'll track the clicks flowing through each one and also attribute clicks to the tags you added. In your dashboard, you can compare each link against the other, and you can also compare the two channels, which becomes useful when you use the same tag on more than one link.

Now, let's suppose you decided to add a banner ad to your blog, in addition to the link you published in one of the blog posts? It would be helpful to know if it is generating better results. So, you can create another link, using the same "myblog" tag you used before in the Source field, but this time you would also add a value for Medium. You could call it "banner".

With this info, your dashboard is starting to become a marketing analytics super-tool! You can still compare results between Facebook and your blog as a whole, but you can now also compare different placements within your blog. Later in the year, you might want to promote your book through the same channels, but offer a "Summer Discount". You could add a Campaign value of "summer-discount" and compare it to other promotions.

Without going into the details of how to use the other layers of tags, you can probably see how tags can give you insights into your outgoing traffic that would be impossible without Genius Link!

The TRACK Parameter

Would you like to use different Source tags on a single link that is used across multiple sources? No problem! You can use the TRACK parameter to override any existing "Source" tag on that link, allowing you to change the source of the link on the fly without having to build a new one each time.

 Note: the TRACK parameter is not case sensitive.

To do this, simply add a question mark "?" or ampersand "&" depending on if this is the first link parameter or not. Then "TRACK=insertTrackingCode" to the end of a geni.us link, and post it anywhere you like.

For example:


compared to..



Geni.us Links Built From an Affiliate Link

If your Geni.us Link is built from an affiliate link that was set up with a tracking tag through one of the affiliate networks, you don't need to do anything. Genius Link will now pass this tracking tag along to each of the affiliate networks to track your link globally.

Some Hints

Choose a Format For Your Tracking Tags

It's a good idea to set up a schema of a few things you'd like to track and separate each keyword by a common delimiter. For example you may want to compare marketing channels by app. To do so, your tracking tags might look like "MarketingChannelName-AppName". For example:

  • {tracking tag}=Facebook-App1
  • {tracking tag}=Website-App2
  • {tracking tag}=TW-App3
  • {tracking tag}=ChartBoost-App1
  • {tracking tag}=EmailFooter-App3

Everyone uses these differently, so test it out for yourself and see what works best for you and your marketing campaigns!



You'll find reports throughout the Genius Link Dashboard for clicks (and commissions, EPC and TCS when used for iTunes links) on the Account, Group and Link level performance reports. Additionally, we've added a new level of reporting functionality using these new Tracking Tags:

To learn how you can use your Tracking Tags as UTM codes for Google Analytics, click here.

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