If you’ve heard about URL or link shorteners before you probably understand what they can be used for. If you don’t understand the purpose of these tools, we’ll explain it to you in this blog post. We will also offer you tips on why you should use link shorteners and which are the best, for example, http://bit.ly and http://goo.gl.
Example
You’ve just gotten started with your first campaign and you’ve hired influencers that are going to link to your e-commerce site. However, you don’t want to link to the first page of the site but instead to a page where you offer clothes that are currently on sale. The link to your e-commerce site is “www.webbshoppen.se” and the subpage you want to link to is “http://www.webbshoppen.se/?c=rabatt/kategorier/kjolar/1235959.” But it’s not a very attractive link, is it? It’s too long and complicated, and there is no way anyone can remember it. What’s even worse is that it will look really bad on influencer's social media profiles.
The good news is that there is an easy solution to this and it’s called a URL shortener. You can visit the site http://bit.ly (or Google’s version http://goo.gl) to create your own smaller link.
Result: Both of the links direct to the same page
There are several benefits with shortened links. As mentioned earlier, one of the main benefits is a shorter and cleaner link, but there is more to it. For example, when someone shares your bit-ly link instead of your regular link it will collect information about:
Below is an example of a link that 718 people clicked on. To the right you see that 309 of those people came from Sweden, 91 came from Germany, 33 from France, and the rest were from another 48 countries. The conclusion is that this link most likely came from a Swedish content creator with a big international reach.
When you invest in a campaign and have found an influencer that will create content for your product or service, we suggest you provide them with a bit-ly link so that you can track the amount of traffic they generate. Our own solution to this issue is the Beatly’s Influencer Marketing Platform which creates and distributes shortened links to everyone who participates in our campaigns. Naturally, this saves both us and our customers a lot of time and work.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions about URL shorteners or how we follow up with the results generated from our campaigns! Shoot us an email at team@beatly.com!