What is a URL Shortener?

A URL shortener is a basic tool that takes a long URL and transforms it into whatever URL you want it to be. It couldn’t be more simple.

What is a Custom URL Shortener?

A custom URL shortener is when you’ve attached your own custom domain to a URL shortener that serves as the basis for all the shorter links you make. You can use your own domain rather than generic ones such as bit.ly or rebrand.ly.

It’s recommended to use your own custom domain while sharing links online, as this contributes to enhanced trust, brand recognition, and click-through rates.

Importance of URL Shortener

URL Shortening has come a long way over the years since it began in 2000. Here’s a number of pretty nifty stuff you can do with your URL shortener right now:

Link Masking

Obviously, reducing the URL helps you to conceal the original domain name. This is terrible for users in the sense that it helps spammers and hackers to mask harmful links from us. Luckily, with security mitigation tools from Chrome and other browsers, we don’t have to fear about malicious link masking.

Appropriate link masking could be where you take the URL from an important piece of content you’re trying to post, and make it easy to represent a key point in your social message.

Link Shortening

It’s a lot easier to share a short and unforgettable URL than a long one, particularly when those long URLs contain random numbers. What URL are you going to utter to a room filled with people while you’re speaking? The short one or the long one? What URL are you going to mention in your presentation? What URL would you like to tell people at a social function when you run out of business cards? What URL would you like to put in a forum when you post some fresh concepts? 

Whenever you share a link in a public domain, you can use a link shortening device to help enhance the appeal of a link and track the number of click-through rates.

Link Tracking

Link tracking deserves to be the number one justification to shorten the link. As digital marketers and social media administrators, we need to realize the fruits of our work.

ClickMeter is arguably the best technology to track links from click to conversion.

You can notice how many actual visitors clicked on a post relative to the number of bots or spiders. This gives you a more detailed understanding of the actual users coming to your site and the conversion rate. 

Having said this, ClickMeter is not for everybody. It’s more for heavy digital advertisers or social media administrators who want to track massive or ongoing projects in great detail.

Link Retargeting

Have you ever heard about retargeting? This is why you get hit with Amazon advertisements right after you’ve seen a product on its website. Retargeting is simply the process of inserting a little pixel, or a bit of code, to the site so that you can serve advertisements later as people visit it. It’s insanely lucrative for marketers and advertisers.

Just wait a minute, there’s more… Now users don’t even need to visit the website to get labeled with this pixel, they just need to click on the link. It’s called link retargeting.

Link Rotating

Ever tried to run an A/B experiment, but you didn’t know how to do it? With enhanced linking functionality, you can potentially break traffic 50/50 – or 75/25, or whatever – from within the link itself and run a quick landing page test. 

Now this is not important for advertisements, as you can only run two ads, and there are other tools, such as Optimizely, that let you tackle this on the page instead of inside the link, but there are some openings to test split traffic for your links. You can also do things by holding a contest and making the first click go to the “winner” tab, while any other click goes to the “try again” page.

Link Swapping

It’s so easy, but most of the shortening solutions don’t let you do it… You create a shorter link and share it through 12 different networks, then one day down the line, the website on which the link leads is taken down. You don’t have a prayer of changing such old links. 

Well, there’s hope if you own the links with Rebrandly. You may change the URL of the destination if you wish to. It just takes a few seconds, and those 12 links that you posted all those months ago will update instantly.

Conclusion

If you’re on the web at all, you ought to use a shorter URL. Whether it’s for private use as an efficiency hack, or to track and monitor results for your company, use a URL shortener.

For more informative blogs, Check out Change Schooling!