URL Shorteners

Posted by Ryan on Oct 11, 2011 in Ryan's Thoughts | 1 comment

URL shorteners have been around forever. Taking a trip in a time machine would lead you to sites like YTMND and tinyurl; both sites allowed you to take one of those crazy long URLs that we see so many of today, and shorten them into something that is much easier to type in, if not remember.

Most of the links that I see today are bit.ly links – though according to a recent test, tinyurl is the most popular service in North America.

Why Should You Use URL Shorteners?

It’s not just because URLs are growing – there is solid analytical data that can be learned from link shortening. These services allow you to track how many people have clicked on any given link – which means that you can use the data to tune your campaign, your writing, and track you marketing efforts. That link above – I will know exactly how many of you read it. Using my analytics, I can compare that to the number of people who read this post. If I had been hawking an ebook, I would know my conversion rates. Simply put, if you are a business on the web, you should never post a bare link on the internet.

Which URL Shortener Should I Use?

I like and use SnipUrl.com. I don’t really know why, but I’m happy with them. Tinyurl.com, as mentioned above, is the most popular in North America. Goo.gl is Google’s URL shortening service. It is very easy to use, and given the size of Google is the one I would probably recommend most people use. I will probably be migrating there myself in time. While I see a ton of Bit.ly links, I would avoid their use if possible. I have nothing against the fine people at Bit.ly, but the .ly extension stands for Libya (yup, that Libya) and who knows what kind of tomfoolery might happen in that country. If they ever decide to pull the domain extension – you could have years of data lost forever. While technically any of the URL shorteners could go out of business or be shut down, I think it just makes sense to avoid risk if you can.

If you are web savvy, you can also create your own URL shortener. Either create your own links (for example, I could create a page called www.arholota.com/f and then redirect that to my Facebook page – this is what Christopher S. Penn does), or you could potentially purchase your own, shorter domain and use it to host links (though really, if you could have purchased a shorter domain to begin with, you should have).

There are dozens of URL shorteners out there, and you should experiment to find the one that works best for you. They key things to remember are 1) stable and secure 2) trackable.

Have fun!