Why Your Business Needs a URL Shortener?

Why Your Business Needs a URL Shortener?

URL shortener spit out links that are easier to share. More importantly, they let small businesses track marketing campaigns and other incoming traffic.

How many people visited your website last month? How many of them came from a link in your latest newsletter/ Post? How many clicked a link you placed on social media? If you run a small business website, it's in your interest to track the sources of your web traffic to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It can also give you insight about your potential customers or clients. Small businesses don't always have a marketing expert on staffs who knows how to track traffic in this way. You can do it yourself, no matter your technical skill level, and one of the easiest ways is by using a URL shortened and link tracking service.

What Are URL Shorteners?

URL shortener are apps, typically web apps, that take a long URL and shrink it down to fewer characters. Urlty help you to shorten your url’s. If you copy and paste a long link into the main field on Urlty, the web page spits out a much shorter link that goes to the same page. Shortened links display better in emails, print material, and other places.

URL shortener services turn long links into small ones, and that's it. The more capable ones double as link-tracking services. In other words, the app shows you the traffic coming from each link.

This capability is useful because you can then make specific links for specific purposes. Let's say you want people to go to the page YourCompany.com/business-partnerships/new-opportunities. That's a long URL, so you generate two short versions, A and B. You use link A exclusively in cold emails reaching out to new potential partners. Link B goes exclusively into emails with existing partners. That way, you can differentiate the email link traffic coming from new versus existing partners.

Branding Your Links

URL shortener provide even more value, however, by letting you buy a domain that you can use to brand the link to add more brand awareness. For example, when The New York Times makes a short link, it starts with nyti.ms/. Nike, whose logo is a swoosh, starts many of its short links with swoo.sh/.

Getting Started With URL Shorteners

If you start using a URL shortener, you'll learn the ropes as you set up the tool and start making new links. It's all pretty easy. If you are curious to learn more, I would point you to a few keywords that will help you find the right information.

One is UTM. UTM stands for urchin tracking module, but I promise you, that's not important to know at all, if your goal is to make links that help you better track your traffic. If you really want to dive into the details of URL customization, however, go read more about UTM links, UTM codes, or UTM builders.