Long Urls or Short Urls- Which is Good for Digital Marketing?

Could an e-tailer tell what his online address is? Rather than thinking twice, we would answer ‘yes, of course’. Hats must be off to Tim Berners-Lee who derived this very unique concept of URLs or Uniform Resource Locators in 1994.

This evolution provided e-commerce entities their online addresses. And the most appeasing fact is its easy accessibility. They stay just a click away from tapping by the users. With no commutation & trivial monetization, they rush for gold today. This blockbuster idea opens new doors to earn fat revenue.

URLs:

Every page in the website displays its own unique url. It reflects the domain name plus the title of the page. However, the latter (i.e. title of the webpage) is not a norm. But since it is the most fruitful metric to pull traffic in search engines, the online businesses capitalize on this trick. They swell their ranking up and up with this internet marketing strategy.

Long urls are generic. As the content is aired on the website, its url is auto-generated. Just below the title bar, there pops a long horizontal bar with domain name. It’s what we call the url or the online address of the page. Usually, they look long, clunky and quite ugly. If one tries to imitate to share, the typing mistakes can occur. It’s quite obvious.

The intentions of making the content viral promoted while marketing for search engines. It’s insensible for users that fail to catch their eyes. For them, it’s worthless. By taking this fact into account, short urls came in trend. They look aesthetic, short and crispy by occupying less space. Its biggest example is the buzzing of Twitter and LinkedIn that allow 140 characters long urls only.

How to trim short the long urls?

The best and economical way to trim the long url is to put the long one in the Google URL Shortener. Subsequently, they get transformed and become shareable in the emails, social media platforms and traffic pulling websites.

Why Google URL Shortener?   

Since digital marketing is at pinnacle, the need to trim the long urls is the urgency. Apart from pulling online traffic, the need of the hour is to track the clicks. Therefore, the analysis is withdrawn to prep up the digital marketing strategies in 2017 for bringing more traffic on the board.

How to short the url?

  1. Publish the content on the website to create the long url.
  2. Go to the Google URL Shortener.
  3. Copy the original url, i.e. long, & paste it in the shortener.
  4. Click to prove that you’re not a robot.
  5. Then, click the ‘shorten url’ tab.
  6. A pop up box will pop containing the short url. Below will be an option to land to its analytics. By clicking the ‘See Analytics Data’, you can catch the number of clicks, traffic sources and platforms’ details.

Benefits of short urls: 

  • To track the analysis: As told just above, the Google URL Shortener provides a short online address to share. Promotion of web content will be a battle if is not shared on various social media networks and backlink providing websites.

You can walk through the analytics to know the referral sites and the resources from where the traffic came in to the max. Compare with the other organic sources of traffic. Check and count the number of clicks from direct sources and referrals.  Subsequently, you can get the idea of which source requires more boosting or push via online promotions.

  • To share easily on social media:  Social community is impulsive and tends to divert. Long urls can disperse the traffic. But the short url provides more space to write more catchy words for fetching more eyeballs.
  • To share for offline marketing: The offline promotions are run on the hard copies. Imitating the links manually from those resources is a herculean task. And manual copying is prone to errors.
  • To share in the email: Long url can be disguised with spam due to its long and creaky structure. And if you suppose to copy it by self, the error may ground up. Email delivers the clear cut message. But the long structure can reflect it a phishing attack.

But Joshua Schachter-the founder of Delicious, has clashes with the short url ideology. He calls the short ones the third party urls that involves three parties- the publisher, the transit and the clicker. Each party gets redirected that lags the browsing. And if the third party falls sick or collapses, the redirection would land to the broken links. It causes unnecessary diversion.

But the benefits of the short ones exceed the leverages of the long urls. If the url shortener is the own tool of the website, then it would be the best option.