If you are running Facebook Ads and using a Tracker like RedTrack and need or want to include a link in the text of the ad to increase your sales/profits/conversions then you will love this guide.
The traditional or the default tracking link is super long, it contains in most cases a 3rd party URL that your customer’s wont recognize, and having a super long link in the ad text looks spammy and ugly.
So what can we do?  Simple, we can create a SHORT URL that includes our brand.
In my case, my brand is www.BannersLanders.com, and instead of using the default link redtrack gave me which looks like this =>Â {{site_source_name}}&sub2={{placement}}&sub3={{ad.id}}&sub4={{adset.id}}&sub5={{campaign.id}}&sub6={{ad.name}}&sub7={{adset.name}}&sub8={{campaign.name}}&sub9=AD1&sub10=Angle2
As you can imagine, having that super long URL in the ad text/angle part is UGLY & SPAMMY and could actually HURT our conversions, not increase them which is our goal!
Instead of the ugly long link, I want short. I actually would prefer www.bannerslanders.com/order/now
So this is what we do..
-
- Open our FTP Program or File Manager in Cpanel (or if you are an advanced computer nerd, SSH into the server) and go into the public_html directory of your brands’ website.
- Next, create the folder order
- Next, go into the order folder, and create the folder now
- Create a new campaign in AdTrack just for the CTA link you will be using in your ads, what I did is just duplicate my original campaign on my RedTrack and name it In-Text CTA Link shortener campaign, and grabbed the URL {{site_source_name}}&sub2={{placement}}&sub3={{ad.id}}&sub4={{adset.id}}&sub5={{campaign.id}}&sub6={{ad.name}}&sub7={{adset.name}}&sub8={{campaign.name}}&sub9=AD1&sub10=Angle2
- I fired up my trusty NOTEPAD++ (you can use any text editor btw)Â and took this code and added my URL to it, cutting off everything after the ? in the redtrack’s long tracking URL as you can see below.
- Now all we gotta do is save the file in notepad as index.php, then upload it into our destination folder (in my case it’s the now sub-folder inside order, within the public_html on my server
- Next, we test to see if the stuff in the URL is grabbed, and forwarded to our tracker URLTake your shortened URL – ie: https://www.bannerslanders.com/order/now and append the ? and all stuff after it that’s part of the long tracker URL in RedTrack so the shortened URL should look like this -> https://www.bannerslanders.com/order/now/?sub1={{site_source_name}}&sub2={{placement}}&sub3={{ad.id}}&sub4={{adset.id}}&sub5={{campaign.id}}&sub6={{ad.name}}&sub7={{adset.name}}&sub8={{campaign.name}}&sub9=AD1&sub10=Angle2edit the end, so sub10 for me, to something that will make it obvious for testing purposes, i just put TEST-01A, and paste the link in the address bar on your browser.https://www.bannerslanders.com/order/now/?sub1={{site_source_name}}&sub2={{placement}}&sub3={{ad.id}}&sub4={{adset.id}}&sub5={{campaign.id}}&sub6={{ad.name}}&sub7={{adset.name}}&sub8={{campaign.name}}&sub9=AD1&sub10=TEST-01AAfter that, head over to RedTrack and Click on Campaign Stats > Subs drop down – Sub 10, and see if the Test-01A shows up, if it does, then its all good.
- Now it’s time to setup your Facebook Ad so it appends the tracking variables and all that dynamic brackety stuff, but so the only thing that shows inside your ad-text is the beautiful ‘short link’;Â in my case www.bannerslanders.com/order/now
Here’s our ad, as you can see it has a pretty link, not a super long tracking link in it. 
On the edit ad interface, for the website url we’re using a link to another campaign in our tracker, people don’t see this, and we keep the in-text link, and the ad link separate so we know where the customer is coming from what part of the ad they are clicking. Â as you can see, we removed the long string in our tracking link as well, and using the tracking template below to auto-add it. 
In the tracking url parameters box, we’ve pasted the super long string. This will be automatically appended to both the tracking link for the ad, as well as the pretty ‘shortened link’ we added in ad-link-text.
In conclusion, we will run a $5 website clicks objective test to check and make sure the links are working and the dynamic variables are coming through. And we’re good to go 🙂Â
Do you want to read more about the Redtrack? Here are some of the posts: How marketers are using Redtrack with Facebook CAPI to solve the attribution problem, Redtrack review…
