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What is a URL shortener? With the advent of Twitter, a previously niche service known as the URL shortener has come to the forefront of marketers' attention. What a URL shortener does is it takes a long URL, such as "http://www.brainloaf.com/Products/Marketing-Automation-Software.aspx" (a very long, wordy URL which is important for search engine optimization), and shortens it to usually a short domain name like tinyURL.com or bit.ly and uses a 5 or 6 character code on the end of that shorter domain name to represent that URL (http://bit.ly/2LG7VI). This is important for users on micro-blogging or "status update" services like Twitter or Facebook and LinkedIn's status features. These updates have a limited number of characters (140 for example in Twitter). A shorter URL allows people to fully express their thoughts.
Shorteners also help in email and mobile marketing. In e-mail marketing or mobile marketing you may have text wrapping on long URLs in text e-mails. A URL shortener saves you characters in those messages and when the user clicks on that short link are redirected to the original URL as if they have entered and clicked on that long link. Many times, emails and mobile messages with long links could wrap on to multiple lines, making the link unclickable or worse, broken. URL shorteners can unify your links and improve your prospects' experience.
For marketers a secondary benefit of URL shorteners is link tracking. Link tracking is the ability of the short URL to record how many people are clicked on the link, provide details of when people clicked and on what website they saw the URL on. It is even possible to provide every user on your email list with unique links. This would allow you to know which users opened and viewed your marketing messages. Most URL shortening websites have built-in link tracking to monitor what people are clicking on and linking to. That is extremely important and gives you the ability to measure your Twitter, e-mail marketing, and blog posts effectiveness. If you are strapped for time as we all are these days, it's important to understand exactly who's clicking and arriving at your destination. You want to focus your precious time on results generating activities. Here is an example: let's say you are creating a campaign and plan to send messaging out through your blog, an e-mail campaign, a mobile campaign, and a Twitter campaign. If you directed everyone to a single URL then, it would be very difficult to track where people came from. With a URL shortener that provides link tracking, you will know what mediums are most effective.
You can already track visitors and their source using tools like Google Analytics. You are already able to know that you have referrals from Twitter or from your blog but, it's not terribly specific, and clicks from email clients, mobile devices and desktop twitter clients will be grouped together, hiding the source of the traffic. If you use a URL shortening link tracker, you'd know exactly how many visitors are from your Twitter messages, blog postings and even email campaigns. Using a URL shortener you can create 5 different coded links, one for each source your would like to track. This will deliver precise tracking. If you're using Google analytics, it's a lot harder to drill down to that level of detail.
URL shorteners are very important now, but soon I think they will become less important. Right now, people are attracted to them to save characters when embedding a link in a Twitter message. Sooner or later Twitter (and other status updates) will add a separate field for Tweeters to insert a link. There is no technical reason for links to be embedded inside the message of a tweet and it's really a waste of space. As a result the importance of URL shorteners is going to decrease as we better linking features are added to status update application. In addition, there are finite combinations of numbers and things that these URL shorteners provide. The long term benefit of link tracking is the collection of click data and what sources are most responsive to your market. This is more important than the fact they simply save characters. Content management system providers are already adding those capabilities directly into content management systems. We're actively working on that here at Brainloaf for our clients. In order to be effective, marketers need all your analytics in one spot.
I'd like to know which URL shorteners you use and why. Please feel free to leave a comment below.