Today, marketers and organisations are familiar with the notion of URL shortening. However, using it properly is something that you should master in order to achieve the best results. It's one thing to shorten URLs and incorporate them into your content and messages; it's quite another to create branded and customised URLs that simplify reporting and deliver the expected return on investment for the content.
There are several URL shortening solutions available on the market, including Rebrandly, Bitly, Snip.ly, Google, Ow.ly, and Tinyurl.com. If you share any content online, the content may contain shortened URLs. It's critical to realise that using the appropriate shortener the right way will yield the desired results.
Do’s of URL shortener.
1.Create short links that use your company's domain name.
In contrast to a generic domain, people will always remember the name of a branded domain.
2. Use Customized URLs.
Keep it specific and personalize the URLs for every customer. Each section of the URL may be modified, which allows you to use your branded domain as the foundation for many other URLs that each redirect to a different product, feature, category, etc.
3. Try to use short links for podcasts and radio.
The majority of the lengthy URLs are complicated and difficult to memorise in the first place. If you are promoting on the radio or through podcasts, employing short links will be the most effective approach to ensure that people remember the URLs that you give. More traffic will be generated by shorter URLs!
4.Validate data.
If you use shortened links on partner websites, your own website, advertisements, and multiple social media platforms, you will receive data from each of these sources. Never assess the return on investment (ROI) by relying just on the data that you get. Validate the data yourself in order to obtain a more accurate measurement.
5. Custom short links help you to distinguish your product, website, and campaigns.
Readers will always remember your URL since it represents your brand. Using keywords and legacy shorteners to create custom short links will help you make a good first impression with your brand.
Following your knowledge of the best practises for using URL shorteners, you should avoid making the mistakes listed below in the future.
Don’ts of URL shortener.
1. Using an arbitrary url slug.
The use of a random URL slug, also known as a slashtag, is the most common error that social media marketers make when it comes to URL shorteners.
However, social media marketers are unwilling to spend the extra 2 minutes on shortened links to make their link "beautiful" by using a branded and customised domain name, even if it means losing out on a potential sale. For the url slug, use a keyword.
I recommend that you always put in the additional effort up front in order to enjoy the long-term rewards of improved trust in links and, in certain cases, a higher search engine ranking rise.
2. Avoiding UTM Parameters
Social media marketers that use Google Analytics are well aware that 100 percent of traffic will never be traced back to the source of the link. At times, direct traffic from Twitter is received in addition to Twitter traffic. It is critical to employ the UTM parameters when marketing your content in order to prevent this situation. This comprises the source of the campaign, the media used, and the campaign itself.
3. Don't make your URLs any shorter than they need to be.
True... It's referred to be a link shortener, although this is not 2010. We may now shorten URLs for our own advantage, rather than only for the sake of brevity. Because Twitter has standardised all URLs at 23 characters, the size of your links is irrelevant. However, if two equally beautiful possibilities existed, I would choose the shorter one.
If you're contemplating a domain with the name Acme Tires, avoid the following:
- acmtrs.com
- actrs.com
Rather than that, try the following:
- acmetires.com
- acme.com
- tires.com
Depending on your brand and the keywords you're targeting, any of these options may be acceptable.
Furthermore, if you already own a domain and are sharing a link on hubcaps, avoid the following:
acme.link/hbcps
Rather than that, complete it:
acme.com/hubcaps
Alternatively, you might make it a little more profit-oriented:
Acme.com/get-awesome-hubcaps
4.Caitalization of Keywords.
Would you like to understand more about the issue with many of the generic link shorteners that are available?
Upper-case letters are treated differently than lowercase ones.
Consider the following scenario: you are speaking at an event and you want everyone to go to derric.link/Slides to download the slide deck you are discussing. Consider what it would be like to have to explain to everyone that "Oh, it's a capital 'S'."
It just doesn't make any sense. This is not the way the human mind operates at all. We don't want to have to think about whether anything is in uppercase or lowercase.
5. Shortening a Shortened URL.
It is beneficial to shorten a URL for content marketing purposes. However, shortening a already shortened URL is not a good idea. Have you ever encountered a situation when you clicked on a shortened link and the website took an eternity to load? This might be caused by a double redirect, which occurs due to shortening of shortened URLs. So make sure that the shortened link redirects directly to the target page and not to another shortened link.
