Often when you are working on your blog, website, or marketing campaign you will want to track traffic and conversions. One of the most commonly used tools to do this are short links.

One of my favorite ways of managing short links is by using a WordPress plugin called Pretty Links.  In this post I will go ov

er the installation and configuration of the standard Pretty Links plugin.

Installation

As standard in WordPress plugins the administration console is used. Simply mouse-over the Plugins option select the Add New option in the sub-menu.

In the Keyword box on the Add New screen enter “Pretty Links”. The plugin should be the first option on the screen. Select Install Now and then once it's downloaded select Activate.

Configuration

To open the plugin screens, select Pretty Links on the left toolbar. That should being bring up the main screen. This is where all shortlinks that you add will live.

If you select the Add Pretty Link at the top or sub-menu on the left toolbar then the following screen will open. This is where you can add short links.

The following are (in my opinion) the most important fields on this screen.

• Redirection| This is the type of redirection that will be performed when this link is used. Most often you will leave this as the default “307 (temporary)”.
• Target URL| This is the address that the link will lead to
• Pretty Link| This is the text that will be used as your link. A random short code will be there by default. If you would like something custom then you simply enter it here

To add and activate the short link then click Create.

The next submenu for the plugin would be Groups.

This is where you can set up groups for your links. If you would like to add a custom group, say Affiliate Links, then you could create each of your links and add them to a group. You can view the groups in this screen. It also allows you to view analytics in the plugin for the entire group instead of having to examine each one.

After you click on the Add Group button then this is the screen that will come up. You simple add the name of the group, description, and the Links will be where all the member links will show up on this screen. To finish the creation of this group you simply click Create.

That is the basic installation, configuration, and operation of Pretty Links. There are additional capabilities for the Pretty Links Pro version.

Here list the description of the additional functionality for the Pro version:

• Auto-replace keywords throughout your site with Pretty Links
• Protect your affiliate links by using Cloaked Redirects
• Redirect based on a visitor's location
• Auto-prettylink your Pages & Posts
• Find out what works and what doesn't by split testing your links
• And much, much more!

I've had the Pro version so long that I had forgotten what the differences where and quite frankly they're not very good and giving a list of the benefits. I've been using it for a while now so I'll just say that I love it.