Address bar

AddThis Adds Real-Time Sharing Analytics

Frederic Lardinois

Jun 8, 2011 — 1 min read

AddThis, the popular service that allows publishers to monitor how their content is shared on over 300 different social media sites, just introduced a new service that displays sharing activity as it occurs in real time. Whenever a user now uses the embedded AddThis links in a story to share your content on any of AddThis’ supported networks, the new Live View dashboard will update immediately.

In addition to this, AddThis now also features a new feature that allows publishers to track how stories are shared when somebody just copies and pastes a URL. To enable these Address Bar sharing analytics, publishers have to add a small script to all of their pages that then reformats every URL to end with a unique identifier (like #.TfAZD-b2saU). This doesn’t affect how search engines index a page, but allows AddThis to track how a webpage is shared outside of its widgets (through IM and email, for example).

Overall, this second feature looks more interesting to me than the real-time updates. Unless you run a very popular site, there isn’t much you can do with this sharing data. Instead, it makes more sense to focus on real-time traffic analytics through Chartbeat or Woopra (my personal favorite).

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