Instrumenting your Web content so you can determine what people are responding to is a big undertaking. And if you are in, say, the marketing department and you want to send out a newsletter and get some kind of real idea about whether your readers "click through" you may find that the Web guys can't move fast enough because of their workload.

So, what do you do? Just look at the existing analytics reports and try to figure out what the impact of your content is? Just give up?

Here's a viable alternative: Cligs, a site that provides a short URL service with built-in analytics. The idea is simple, once you've registered you can create short URLs. When these short URLs are requested Cligs logs and analyzes the access and then redirects.

A really interesting feature is the ability to create conditional redirection based on the geosource of the requester. So, for example, if the request comes from Italy and you have an Italian version of your content you can have the Clig redirect the browser to the appropriate URL.

The Clig details page reports the total number of hits for each Clig as well as a graph of hits by day; the countries the hits have come from (literally – there’s no deeper detail); hits by referrer; hits by which bots (Yahoo Slurp, Googlebot, and Googlebot Mobile) have spidered the URL; which social media services (Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.) have generated hits; and finally the number of links from social media to the destination URL.

While Cligs isn’t a solution that applies to the bigger analytical problem of instrumenting and tracking activity for whole Web sites (it lacks the ability to track individual users over multiple transactions and can’t be used with dynamic URLs such a URLs requested by forms) it is a great mechanism for overall response measurement.

Cligs also offers a Firefox bookmarklet for creating Clig URLs (you can find the bookmarklet on the Cligs home page).

Cligs also boasts an API that allows you to encode a long URL or expand an existing Clig URL. At present there is no API to retrieve stats, which is a shame as it would allow you to build widgets and control panels for monitoring as well as integrate the Clig stats with other data.

This is a great service and did I mention that it’s free? If you try it out let me know what you think of the results.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.