Track Link Clicks With Firebase: A Simple Step-By-Step Guide (2023)

Startups track link clicks for 3 common use cases:

• To measure the success of their marketing campaigns - Conversion rates indicate how effective the marketing copy is at convincing users to perform a meaningful action.
• To assess feature usage - You can associate feature usage with click events to better understand how people use your app, which features are most popular, and which features are not being used at all. A product with too many features that are not being used is a sign of a bad product/market fit, so this is a metric product managers appreciate.
• For affiliate marketing - Affiliate marketing is a common business model for SaaS companies: you use link clicks to track the performance of your affiliates and optimize accordingly.

Chances are, you need to do one of those 3 things as an app builder. With Rowy, our Firebase CMS, you can track link clicks in 3 easy steps that take less than 5 minutes, and that's exactly what we're going to see in the following article.

If you prefer video formats, check out our full video on the topic:

1. Get The Demo

You can clone the demo from our official library to obtain a working example in seconds:

This Rowy table captures how many times a link has been clicked. You can use it in emails, chat polls, blog posts, etc. The visitor just clicks the link, then Rowy processes the request and redirects the user to the desired destination.

In this demo, clicking the link triggers an upvote or a downvote. But you can adapt it to suit any use case you like, it's just an example. Let's see how it works.

2. Add Your Webhook URL

The demo leverages Rowy's webhook feature to process incoming clicks. You just create a new webhook URL to perform an action, write the parser logic to update the database, and then simply share the webhook URL with the parameters you need:

In this example, if a user clicks the link https://rowy-hooks-wylpw2t4lq-uc.a.run.app/wh/feedbackLink/XXX?id=sandbox&vote=thumbsup, the row with the id sandbox will have its thumbsup column incremented. That's what the parser logic does.

We just need to specify our custom webhook URL in the thumbsupLink and thumbsdownLink columns to have our user-facing links generated automatically without having to enter each parameter manually. To do so, we use Rowy's derivative columns:

3. Add The Action Links To Your Website

Now that our URLs are ready, we can add them to our website. For example, in a blog post:

```html <a href="https://rowy-hooks-wylpw2t4lq-uc.a.run.app/wh/feedbackLink/XXX?id=sandbox&vote=thumbsup" target="_blank"

Thumbs up ```

You can use the generated links anywhere, and you can of course customize the returned HTML or redirect the user to another page directly.

Using the same logic, you can track link clicks for any use case:

• For affiliate links, you can add a ref parameter to the URL to track the source of the affiliate. Add the destination URL as an extra URL parameter and redirect the user to it after processing.
• For feature usage, you can use the id column to describe the tracked feature and use the thumbsup value as a counter.
• Same for conversion rates―just track the number of persons visiting your page and you'll get a percentage of people clicking on the link.

It works for everything, and it's super easy to implement!

Join Rowy On Discord

If you have any questions, feel free to join our Discord community and ask them there. We're happy to help!

Hope this article was helpful! Analytics are a crucial part of any app to understand how users interact with it and improve from this feedback. And link tracking is one of the most parts of measuring success: combined with Firebase push notifications, it's a great way to drive retention up! Get started with Rowy today, it's free!