Key Concepts

awe.sm is designed to help you track social sharing behavior.

awe.sm is quite different from traditional URL shorteners:

Each awe.sm link represents a single share action—not just a long URL. If a user shares a page to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, 3 unique awe.sm links would be created in order to track the performance of each social network.

Each awe.sm link can contain data about the sharer, how the link was created, where the link was shared, and more. You provide this data to awe.sm when the link is created—or alternatively before or shortly after. This metadata, combined with performance data, allows you to discover the factors that contribute to the best-performing sharing behaviors.

Performance can be measured in 5 ways: clicks, page views, goal conversions and revenue, shares, and clicks per share. Stats can be retrieved on individual awe.sm links or aggregated and grouped by data fields.

awe.sm links can redirect dynamically. Rules (called redirection patterns) can be defined to append URL parameters to the destination URL. These additional parameters can have values from data available at the time of link creation, or at the time of the click. This has a variety of uses: from automatically adding your referral code to Amazon.com product page URLs to passing an awe.sm link's data into another analytics product, such as Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture.

awe.sm links can have a parent-child relationship. If a user clicks on an awe.sm link shared on Facebook and then reshares the page, a new awe.sm link can be created that attributes the referring awe.sm link. Parentage is defined by the parent metadata value in any link-creation step.

Next Steps

• Creating a link
• Enabling conversion tracking
• Retrieving stats

Last updated 2011-10-19