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Google Drive, as you likely already know, is a wildly popular cloud storage platform. It’s often used by teams for collaboration on projects ranging from content marketing to reports for key stakeholders and more.
Many businesses create and even store some of their most high-value content in Google Drive.
And, unsurprisingly, many businesses want to be able to track activity on those high-value pieces. They look for benefits like trackable links, which can help keep track of who is viewing a document and where t hey came from.
There are plenty of reasons why you should use Google Drive trackable links (which we’ll discuss!), and in this post we’ll show you how to use trackable links in Google Drive, including the non-native alternatives you need to see!
A trackable link— also sometimes called a “trackable” or “tracking” URL— is a particular kind of link that will track and record which users have clicked on it, when they clicked, and where they clicked from.
You’ll often see tracking links used in marketing and advertising campaigns so marketers are able to determine which ads or posts drove potential eads to get in touch, but there are plenty of use cases for tracking links.
Tracking links can offer the following benefits and use cases:
Google Drive has basic document tracking functionality— but only if you’re a Workspace customer with enterprise, business, education, or nonprofit plans.
Their document tracking features will show you who viewed a document and at what date and time, but you can only track if you’ve directly shared the link with edit access through sharing permissions. If you set the document to “anyone with link can access,” tracking can’t be implemented.
This is obviously a problem. You want to track a link, but you don’t want to have to give everyone viewing it access to actually edit it, and those are ultimately your two options.
And businesses using just the standard Google Drive are out of luck; that’s as Google’s link tracking functionality goes, however.
And since Google Drive is often used by many businesses and companies, they have to find ways to get around this— especially since Google used to have trackable links that offered more data.
You do need to share documents and links amongst team members, stakeholders, vendors, and potential clients.
Want to set up link tracking with Google Drive so you can keep an eye on the traffic coming to your documents?
The best option is to actually rely on other non-native solutions. Let’s take a look at a few options that are available to you.
Content Camel is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software solution that makes it easy to set up link tracking capabilities in addition to managing, sharing, and auditing all of your content.
Our short links are automatically generated for every asset you store in our system that’s accessible and shareable. Sharing content, therefore, is a snap, and can be easily done through the Chrome Extension.
The short URLs can be customizable, and they’re fully trackable, so you can see who is sharing the content, which documents are being viewed, and more. All shares and viewed are automatically recorded in our advanced analytics software.
See how to easily create trackable short links in just a few steps on Content Camel.
There are tools available online that create short, trackable URLs. These have long been used in advertising, attaching unique links to web campaigns and in placements online so you can track where clicks came from.
Bit.ly is one of the most popular tools for this purpose, and it gets the job done. You can track link shares and clicks, receiving notifications.
That said, this tool is only a URL tracker; it doesn’t know much about your content, and it doesn’t offer content storage or organization features. You have to pay to store it elsewhere or to put it on your own domain, and you can’t cusotmize the links.
Still, this tool can be sufficient if you only need a trackable link creator and nothing else.
Sales and marketing teams pour an enormous amount of time, resources, and often funding into creating their sales assets.
Trackable links can help you determine who is viewing your assets and where they came from. This is great for content audits, and can give you invaluable insights into what’s working and what content your sales loves most. For this reason, you should consider trackable links as an asset for sales enablement.
While Google Workspace or Bit.ly can work as “just fine” solutions for this purpose, many businesses will benefit from opting for a DAM and content management system like Content Camel. All of our assets automatically have trackable short links, and you can receive notiifcations and analytics on when your content is shared and viewed.
**Content Camel is the ultimate sales enablement tool, making it easy to store, organize, manage, and (of course!) share your assets with the right people. Start your free trial here. **
Dead simple trackable links for all of your assets.
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.