URL Shorteners: The Power of URL Shortening Services

URL shorteners: What are they?

URL shorteners, long story short , or link shorteners are services that can transform very long links into a short and manageable link. Very easy and simple. The question now is, are URL shorteners worth the hustle? Let's start with our journey to dissect the power and use of these services.

In this awesome article, we will see the power of the URL shorteners. We will take a look on how these services can help our online business. We will also check an excellent URL shortening service, our own L-ink.me. So fasten your seat belts and let's dig together in the details.

Benefits of URL Shorteners

Imagine you are trying to get your favorite snack from the top shelf of the kitchen. Being short doesn't help right? But the issue is not the same with URLs. As a matter of fact, the shorter the URL the better it is for you.

Below are the top reasons why you should always shorten your long URLs.

Manageability and Simpliness

Take a look at the below two links. Which of the two links do you think is more simple?

Google Search

Google Search

URL Shortening

Shortened Google Search

These two links are both the same link. I have shortened the first link with custom words using L-ink.me (we will get to that). This has made my link very short and simple. And who doesn't love short and simple links? I bet you did not enter many links before just because they were too long and distracting. Plus imagine sharing the links on social media! Which link would you rather share?

URL Shortening on twitter

Link Sharing on Twitter

Link Tracking in URL Shorteners

Another very important advantage of the URL shorteners is that they allow you to track your links. Let's go to L-ink.me and show you what I mean.

This is the same link I used in the above example. I opened it twice. You can check below all the details about those clicks.

URL  tracking clicks

Total Number of Clicks

Not only it shows you the total clicks number, but it shows you several other useful data. It shows you from which countries people are mostly clicking your links and what devices they are using.

URL Shortening tracking

Top Countries and Devices

Not only that, let's suppose you are now running a marketing campaign. You added the links in your email marketing campaign and on your social media.

L-ink.me can show you from where did the clicks arrive, so you can run better marketing campaigns targeting your best audience.

tracking

Build Custom Audience Using Pixels

Let me first explain what a pixel is. A pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. Let's take Facebook pixel for instance. Once you've set up the Facebook pixel, the pixel will fire when someone takes an action on your website. Examples of actions include adding an item to their shopping cart or making a purchase. The pixel receives these actions, or events, which you can view on your Facebook pixel page in Events Manager. From there, you'll be able to see the actions that your customers take. You'll also have options to reach those customers again through future Facebook ads.

L-ink.me has this awesome feature built in to your link where you can track your pixels and target the audience that reacted to your campaign. You can target these audiences in similar future campaigns.

URL Shortening pixels

Tracking Pixels

Reduce SMS Marketing Cost

SMS marketing is also a great marketing strategy. You can directly send your advertisement to the phone on your audience and they can click to open from their mobile. But most SMS marketing companies charge on the size of your SMS. So it is crucial that you shorten your link before sending it to your customers. Moreover, a shortened link looks far less suspicious than the normal long link you have.

Now really, which of the below SMS is better?

SMS

Custom Branded links using URL Shorteners

Using the link shortener L-ink.me, there are 2 ways to customize your links. Not only it makes your links shortener, but you can add custom words to show the people a description of the link. You did not get me? Let's dive in right into a live example. Below is a link from our Facebook page h-educate. Both below links are the same link, but you can see that I added custom words in the link indicating that it is a Facebook link.

link shortened

This is easily done using L-ink.me service. Just go to the link shortener page and add your custom words in the custom Alias. It is that simple.

custom alias

And btw, go to the link here to check an awesome advice. Trust me you will like it.

And if you like adding custom words to your link, imagine adding a custom domain to your short link. Yes you read that right! You will be able to get the short link with your own domain. Go check it our here! It is awesome.

custome domain

Let's check out how this works.

First you need to add a CNAME record containing your subdomain and set its value to l-ink.me as per below. Remember, changes may take up to 36 hours.

URL shortener custom

My subdomain is links, so I will add a custom domain in the custom domain page as : http://links.yourdomain.com (or whatever your subdomain and domain is).

url shortener custom

To test if your link is working, below page should open when you insert your custom link in the browser.

Now go ahead and shorten links using your own custom domain! Make sure to select your custom domain from the choose domain list.

custom domain link shortener

And voila! Easy and beautiful, just like a piece of cake!

Extra Features in L-ink.me

Bundles

I guess the name speaks about the feature. With L-ink.me, you can set up a bundle of links shortened and used in one link. To understand better what I am talking about, let us look at the example below.

First create bundle.

bundles

Once bundle is created, you can go to any shortened link and add it to the bundle.

Once done, you will have a bundle containing multiple links. Just type the link of the bundle and you will see all the links added to this bundle. This is very cool!

Splash Pages

This is an awesome feature. Imagine where you can a custom transitional page containing an avatar along with a message to represent your brand or company. You can have unlimited splash pages and you can choose one for each URL. All you have to do is just go in the L-ink.me dashboard and create you splash page!

Head over to L-ink.me and start your free account today!

Also, there is a very great deal for it. You can have lifetime access to all the features you want for only…(you know what, go check the awesome price yourself).

Conclusion

Sharing long, complex URLs online is not a good idea – hence the need for link or URL shorteners. The simplest and most effective way to avoid the pitfalls is to understand how URL shorteners work. Through this knowledge, you can seek to understand how shortened URLs behave in different situations, enabling you to harness the benefits for your own gain in Digital marketing and your Online Business.