Sarah Worsham

Twitter’s 140 character limit brought URL shorteners (like bit.ly, ow,ly, etc.) into the limelight.  Now, URL shorteners are commonplace – many services and applications embed their functionality (TweetDeck, for example), and even Google & Facebook have come out with their own shorteners (goo.gl and fb.me).  A lot of websites and analytics programs rely on variables included in the URL to know more information about where a person came from (what site referred them).  When an URL is shortened and then shared across social media sites, does that mess up the statistics?  Does Google Analytics, for example, know where someone came from when a URL which includes extra information is shared on Twitter?

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