How to Use URL Shortening and Tracking to Grow Your Business

If you own a business you might find yourself glued to certain metrics. How many people landed on your business page or website last month? How many of them were a direct link? How many of them came through a URL that was added to your message? How many people clicked on the URL that you had placed on different social media platforms?

As a business owner, these questions matter a lot to you. Understanding who is visiting your website can help you track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and give you a good idea of who your potential customers are.

Tracking metrics is obviously important and URL shorteners and trackers can help you track while also strengthening your brand identity. Customized, shortened URLs are one of the most used tools to market your business content on social media. And most importantly these links allow you to track incoming traffic and marketing campaigns while maintaining a cohesive brand identity.

Getting Started With URL Shorteners

There are many URL shortening tools available, so you’ll need to select one that works for your needs. You’ll quickly be able to start creating new short links that you can add to your business marketing messages. If you choose to customize your links, make sure to add branded domains, content keywords, UTM parameters, and capitalization.

5 Reasons Why URL Shorteners are Useful to Promote Content on the Web

URL shorteners benefit in many ways but here are the top 5 reasons why URL shorteners are useful to promote content on the web. Ultimately, they generate traffic for your business and help promote your brand:

• They make URLs more meaningful and manageable
• They have the capacity to track and compile the click data
• They can be easily transformed in social media services
• They can offer users useful features
• Simply put, they also promote sharing

Create Short URLs for your Social Channels

Adding a URL to your social media messages is always a good idea. Long URLs are often ignored, look clunky, and give the appearance that your brand is not up to date. Think about creating short URLs, customized with keywords matching your brand! Brand identity and cohesion goes a long way.

When you plan your content marketing, every word of your message will count. Short messages with long URLs are always overlooked. If you want to increase the chances of the content being read, using URL shorteners is a smart move.

URL Shortening – Are there any Negatives? 

Although there are many benefits of using URL shortening, there are some disadvantages. By understanding these you can avoid mistakes and not be caught by surprise if you run into any problems.

1. At times, URL Shorteners cause redirection

Considering the many benefits of shortening a URL, at times, people tend to shorten the shortened URLs further. This creates multiple redirections. Suppose you click on a shortened URL. Then ideally, you should redirect to the source link. But if the shortened URL has another shortened URL, you get redirected elsewhere or it takes forever for the page to open. With this, you may lose your traffic!

2. Link Shortening and Spammers

URL shorteners are icing on the cake for the spammers. This is because they can easily hide their nefarious URLs in shortened links. As the destination page is hidden in the shortened URLs, the spammers latch onto URL shortening like leeches. People have experienced that shortened URLs can lead to random pages, increasing the possibility of spamming.

3. Link shorteners may involve middlemen

As link shortening services are offered by middlemen who sit in between the end result and your users, you have a dependency on them to keep your shortened link viable till the end.

What Link Shorteners Do?

The benefits of URL shortening will always overpower its limitations. You can never overlook the usefulness of link shortening for promoting your content on social media channels. The additional feature of analytics that measures the traffic coming back to your website, gives URL shortening more power. Using a customized URL with capitalization and a branded domain is a comfortable way to avoid spamming and distrust.

With a branded domain added to the shortened URLs, they become branded as well. Your company name, its brand, the identity is carried forward with your shortened URL. Within this, you can assure that the links that you share are not spammed and instead remembered by the customers.

Earlier, URL shorteners were merely used as URL shorteners to address email systems that would break long URLs and wrap any email after 80 characters. Later, some social media platforms, including Twitter, introduced a 140-character limit. Innovations in the world of URL shortening gained momentum. Today, using URL shortening and tracking assists your business in many ways.

Sounds great, right? Bundled with so many benefits, who wouldn’t use these tools for their business success?

The Takeaway?

Using URL shortening and tracking will help you track and measure your business. Customers will appreciate the brand cohesiveness and your content will be taken more seriously. By using a custom branded domain for your URL shortener, people can be reassured that you are not spamming. More importantly, all this will lead to more clicks and hits to the shortened URLs added to your content.